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... as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.

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
Literature
Addition
Suffering
Usual
Fear
Contribution
May
Complete
Able
Mere
Book
Worth
Much
Doubt
Heap
Make
Books
Lest

More quotes by George Eliot

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Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
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I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
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Hear Everything and judge for yourself
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Though I am not endowed with an ear to seize those earthly harmonies, which to some devout souls have seemed, as it were, the broken echoes of the heavenly choir--I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts.
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Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
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History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.
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Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
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A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.
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Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
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Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
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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.
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There's many a good bit o' work done with a sad heart.
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Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
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Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.
George Eliot
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Speech is often barren but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
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When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.
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There's truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer but whether it's truth worth my knowing, is another question.
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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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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 tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.
George Eliot