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Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

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
Spent
Letter
Degrees
Remove
Process
Precious
Better
Attempt
Misrepresentation
Live
Impression
Weaving
Writing
Degree
Impressions
Life
False
Quietly
Letters
Uncertain

More quotes by George Eliot

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There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?
George Eliot
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Eros has degenerated he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
George Eliot
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To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
George Eliot
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How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
George Eliot
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Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again the parted hills are left scarred if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.
George Eliot
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Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days but in everything else what changes!
George Eliot
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I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.
George Eliot
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The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.
George Eliot
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Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.
George Eliot
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Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
George Eliot
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If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.
George Eliot
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Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
George Eliot
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May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot
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To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is the sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue.
George Eliot
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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
George Eliot
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A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
George Eliot
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Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
George Eliot
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It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot