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Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

George Eliot

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George Eliot
Age: 61 †
Born: 1819
Born: November 22
Died: 1880
Died: December 22
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
Mary Anne Evans
Mary Ann Evans
Marian Evans
Mary Anne Evans Cross
Mary Anne Cross
Things
Quality
Caustic
Literature
Sears
Others
Paradoxes
Order
Paradox
Happens
Handle
May
Fingers
Play
Dead
Sear
Make
Happen
Scorch

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Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
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People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.
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I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.
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Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains blends yearning and repulsion and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
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My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
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These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.
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The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.
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The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.
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Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
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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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There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.
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Subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
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The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.
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The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
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Breed is stronger than pasture.
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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them.
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Ignorance ... is a painless evil so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.
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Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
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There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born.
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