Quote

It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found - in loving obedience.

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
Blessing
Flee
Instead
Obedience
Alone
Vain
Findings
Greater
Finding
Found
Seeking
Thought
Loving
Work
Sake
Appoints

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When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.
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Consequences are unpitying.
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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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Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
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If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.
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Expenditure--like ugliness and errors--becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.
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Primary (the LDS Church's Sunday school for children) is where you go to do with somebody else's mother the things you would do with your own mother if she weren't so busy teaching Primary.
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It seems to me as a woman's face doesna want flowers it's almost like a flower itself.... It's like when a man's singing a good tune, you don't want t' hear bells tinkling and interfering wi' the sound.
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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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Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
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A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts. —WORDSWORTH.
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Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
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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.
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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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A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest.
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Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.
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It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
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Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
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We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
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Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling.
George Eliot