"I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things."
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George Eliot quotes (page 8 of 51)
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"Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight."
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"A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge."
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"I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them."
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"A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other."
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"It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas."
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"Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness."
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"We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light."
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"Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths."
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"What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity."
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"There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time."
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"There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling."
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"An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth."
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"It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult."
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"There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger."
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"Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline."
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"No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference."
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"The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words."
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"Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it."
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"Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down."
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