George Eliot, Middlemarch

Quotes

• “To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that disc...”
• “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly ...”
• “Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach ...”
• “Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel imp...”
• “The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to se...”
• “Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confiden...”
• “When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor w...”
• “It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjo...”
• “To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.”
• “what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
• “It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”