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bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

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
Gin
Amusing
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Literature
Spiritual

More quotes by George Eliot

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Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
George Eliot
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Loquacity with tongue or pen is its own reward -- or, punishment.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot
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Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.
George Eliot
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Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot
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There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
George Eliot
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Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.
George Eliot
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I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
George Eliot
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It is very difficult to be learned it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.
George Eliot
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People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.
George Eliot
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Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot
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Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.
George Eliot
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Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself it only requires opportunity.
George Eliot
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There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
George Eliot
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It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us as if life were not sacred too.
George Eliot
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Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
George Eliot
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To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is the sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue.
George Eliot
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She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
George Eliot