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

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Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
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Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.
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I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.
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Even success needs its consolations.
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The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.
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Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?
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It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.
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The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.
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I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
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To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
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There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.
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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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I love words they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.
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Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
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There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
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No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.
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You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.
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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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Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
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When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.
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