Quote

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

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
Asked
Behaving
Friend
Visit
Duty
Trick
Break
Breaks
Within
Gates
Something
Tricks
Like
Legs
Heavy
Unexpectedly

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... indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.
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Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
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It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.
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It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.
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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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You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.
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Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.
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We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.
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Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
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With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
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In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
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The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
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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'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
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Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
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