Middlemarch Quotes

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“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 discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is—I wouldn’t give twopence for him’— here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“After all, the true seeing is within.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch