Quotes about George Eliot

George Eliot makes us share their lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit of sympathy. She is no satirist....But she gathers in her large grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them loosely together with a tolerant understanding which, as one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free, but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears.

But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.

What right have such men to represent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly?

Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.

In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned.

She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.

but, dear me! has it not by this time ceased to be remarkable--is it not rather that we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man — what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles! 'Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be — is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic?

character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.