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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.

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
Life
Breathe
Gasping
Misery
Condemns
Air
Breathes
Youth
Sore
Joy
Framed
Worst
Noblest
Athirst
Nature
Joys
Shallows
Things
Petty
Scanty

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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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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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We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, Oh, nothing! Pride helps and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.
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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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All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.
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But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that men would be so, and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.
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The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.
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In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.
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Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
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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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O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men's search to vaster issues.
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Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families it's the safe side for madness to dip on.
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Expenditure--like ugliness and errors--becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.
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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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A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
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There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.
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Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
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You are discontented with the world because you can't get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it's a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.
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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.
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