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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
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Writer
Mary Anne Evans
Mary Ann Evans
Marian Evans
Mary Anne Evans Cross
Mary Anne Cross
Men
Birthplace
Duties
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Choose
Duty
Woman
Father
Mother

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The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.
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bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.
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The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
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What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.
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Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
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Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
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So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.
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When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.
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If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you'd think I should to share those good things but I should better to share in your trouble and your labour.
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Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.
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No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.
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I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
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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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Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and would cut them in two.
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But certain winds will make men's temper bad.
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We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
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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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Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he's sure of losing.
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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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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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