Quote

If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

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
Great
Meaning
Banners
Like
Clothes
Banner
Particular
Striking
Common
Occasion
Words
Hung
Use
Occasions
Felt
Everyday
Place
Sacred

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I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered.
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Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
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To the old, sorrow is sorrow to the young, it is despair.
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Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.
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Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
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She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
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We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
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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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I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
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Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.
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Knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.
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My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
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Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.
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Her heart went out to him with a stronger movement than ever, at the thought that people would blame him. Maggie hated blame she had been blamed her whole life, and nothing had come of it but evil tempers.
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Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!
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It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.
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... there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and go--music, the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study those up to a certain point, women should but in a light way, you know.
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It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.
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Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
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What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
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