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

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Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.
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How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
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Consequences are unpitying.
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Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.
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I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.
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I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate.
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It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.
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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
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I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know.
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There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.
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Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
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You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.
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For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.
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A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
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Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.
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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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Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?
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We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.
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For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
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