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Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

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
Duties
Dignity
Choose
Duty
Woman
Father
Mother
Men
Birthplace

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It is hard to believe long together that anything is worth while, unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.
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Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far, The voice divine of human loyalty.
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I flutter all ways, and fly in none.
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I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
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There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.
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Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.
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I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.
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I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
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Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.
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Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
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It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
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The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.
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Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
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We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.
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Subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
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When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.
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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.
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There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.
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The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.
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O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.
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