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Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

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
Simply
Conjecture
Everybody
Allowance
Knowledge
Incompatible
Better
Confident
Thing
Liberal
Liked
Became
Soon

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To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
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So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
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One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
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It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.
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The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,--whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,--which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.
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Better a false belief than no belief at all.
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We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger.
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The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.
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Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.
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It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
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Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.
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I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
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Say I love you to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.
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There's times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' your hand like a bird. It's like the glass, sometimes, 'ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke.
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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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Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
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When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.
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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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The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.
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... the true seeing is within and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.
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