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George Eliot citations
Page 6

George Eliot, de son vrai nom Mary Ann Evans, est une romancière britannique née le 22 novembre 1819 à Nuneaton et morte le 22 décembre 1880 à Chelsea, à Londres. Elle est considérée comme un des plus grands écrivains victoriens, tous sexes confondus. Ses romans, qui se situent dans une Angleterre provinciale , sont connus pour leur réalisme et leur profondeur psychologique.

Elle prit un nom de plume à consonance masculine afin que son œuvre soit prise au sérieux. Même si les autrices de cette période publiaient librement sous leur vrai nom, l'usage d'un nom masculin lui aurait permis de s'assurer que ses œuvres ne soient pas perçues comme de simples romans d'amour. L'autre facteur décisif a pu être le souhait d'être jugé séparément de son travail d'éditeur et de critique déjà reconnu et le désir de préserver sa vie privée des curiosités du public et notamment sa relation scandaleuse avec George Henry Lewes, un homme marié avec qui elle vécut plus de 20 ans. Wikipedia  

✵ 22. novembre 1819 – 22. décembre 1880  •  Autres noms Marian Evans
George Eliot photo
George Eliot: 302 citations0 J'aime

George Eliot Citations

“Si les choses n'ont pas, pour vous et moi, tourné aussi mal qu'elles l'auraient pu, c'est en grande partie grâce à ces êtres qui ont vécu loyalement une existence discrète et reposent dans des tombes délaissées.”

George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch

George Eliot: Citations en anglais

“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.”

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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.”

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George Eliot livre 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.”

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George Eliot livre 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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

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

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“You told me the truth when you said to me once, "There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for."”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“I began … to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.”

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George Eliot livre Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 1
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

“Already handbills were in circulation; some presenting, in large print, the alternative of justice on the conspirators or ruin to the Republic; others in equally large print urging the observance of the law and the granting of the Appeal. Round these jutting islets of black capitals there were lakes of smaller characters setting forth arguments less necessary to be read: for it was an opinion entertained at that time (in the first flush of triumph at the discovery of printing), that there was no argument more widely convincing than question-begging phrases in large type.”

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George Eliot livre Romola

Volume III, Chapter XIII
Romola (1863)

“Inclination snatches arguments
To make indulgence seem judicious choice.”

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George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world, especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone costumes— that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men. Still, vanity, with a woman’s whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests. How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side—himself in fact a subject— while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better!”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day," said Mr. Irwine. "No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“There comes a night when all too late
The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand,
The eager thought behind closed portals stand,
And the last wishes to the mute lips press
Buried ere death in silent helplessness.”

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George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families...”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 3 (at page 23)

“This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection of himself in the coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer’s mind presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellowmen; and perhaps his experience ought to have warned him how the scene would end. But a full-fed fountain will be generous with its waters even in the rain, when they are worse than useless; and a fine fount of admonition is apt to be equally irrepressible.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man’s animal care for his own skin: that awe of the Divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling.”

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George Eliot livre Romola

Volume I, Chapter XI
Romola (1863)

“The natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Prelude
Middlemarch (1871)

“She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“He rushed before them to the glittering space,
And, with a strength that was but strong desire,
Cried, "I am Jubal, I!…. I made the lyre!"
The tones amid a lake of silence fell
Broken and strained, as if a feeble bell
Had tuneless pealed the triumph of a land
To listening crowds in expectation spanned.
Sudden came showers of laughter on that lake;
They spread along the train from front to wake
In one great storm of merriment, while he
Shrank doubting whether he could Jubal be…”

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George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“It was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“One can say everything best over a meal.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision—men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.”

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George Eliot livre Romola

Volume II, Chapter XVI
Romola (1863)

“But veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.”

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George Eliot livre Romola

Volume II, Chapter XXV
Romola (1863)

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