George Eliot, Adam Bede
33 quotes
"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."
"A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest."
"A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation."
"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."
"In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories."
"Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination."
"Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support."
"In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on."
"If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour."
"Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow."
"What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self."
"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."
"She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery."
"She hates everything that is not what she longs for."
"Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle."
"We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours."
"Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's"
"A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom."
"The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past."
"She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood."
"He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age."
"College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em."
"In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception."
"Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information."
"He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric."