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Adam Bede

“Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“It seems to me now, if I was to find Father at home to-night, I should behave different; but there's no knowing — perhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Chapter 53 http://books.google.com/books?id=0OU8AAAAYAAJ&q=%22Howiver+I'm+not+deny+in+the+women+are+foolish+God+Almighty+made+em+to+match+the+men%22&pg=PA530#v=onepage <br class="br">Adam Bede (1859)

“While the arm is strong to strike and heave,
Let soul and arm give shape that will abide…”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deducted reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Start of Chapter 29 (at page 237)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

“It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage— a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them — like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“Knightly love is blent with reverence
As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”

George Eliot

Letter to Charles Bray (15 November 1857)

“I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and petticoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 77-78)

“It was a still afternoon — the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and its edge of faintly sprinkled moss: an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

This has been paraphrased as: "Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade."
Daniel Deronda (1876)

“Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 81)

“That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger — not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 20 (at page 174)

“Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)