Quote

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

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
Desire
City
Gratify
May
Already
Alleys
Men
Cities
Estate
Love
Imagination
Estates
Call
Distant
Though
Immediate
Future
Exists
Hope
Strive
Drudge

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Love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
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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.
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I am feeling easy now, and you will well understand that after undergoing pain this ease is opening paradise. Invalids must be excused for being eloquent about themselves.
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To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.
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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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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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He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.
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In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
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Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
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Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
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What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?
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Poor dog! I've a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to 'em because they couldn't. I can't help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there's no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can't say half what we feel, with all our words.
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Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
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Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
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Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
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What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
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It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge.
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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.
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To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.
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