Quote

Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy.

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
Line
Hopes
Lime
Risk
Breathing
Limes
Lines
Lots
Languish
Running
Draw
Pestilence
Earth
Cross
Juice
May
Crosses
Lacking
Scurvy
Draws
Breasts
Loftiest
Air
Heroic
Meaner

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We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.
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The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings it will have the soul all to itself.
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Music sweeps by me as a messenger - Carrying a message that is not for me
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The worst of misery Is when a nature framed for noblest things Condemns itself in youth to petty joys, And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life Gasping from out the shallows.
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We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .
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Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.
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Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
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There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
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There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
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A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.
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In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.
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If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.
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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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Eros has degenerated he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
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Those who trust us educate us.
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There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man can work.... The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.
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Kisses honeyed by oblivion.
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