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George Eliot citations
Page 7

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

“We mortals sometimes cut a pitiable figure in our attempts at display. We may be sure of our own merits, yet fatally ignorant of the point of view from which we are regarded by our neighbour. Our fine patterns in tattooing may be far from throwing him into a swoon of admiration, though we turn ourselves all round to show them.”

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George Eliot livre Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 11 (at page 117)

“Sudden and near the trumpet's notes out-spread,
And soon his eyes could see the metal flower,
Shining upturned, out on the morning pour
Its incense audible; could see a train
From out the street slow-winding on the plain
With lyres and cymbals, flutes and psalteries,
While men, youths, maids, in concert sang to these
With various throat, or in succession poured,
Or in full volume mingled. But one word
Ruled each recurrent rise and answering fall,
As when the multitudes adoring call
On some great name divine, their common soul,
The common need, love, joy, that knits them in one whole.
The word was "Jubal!"… "Jubal" filled the air,
And seemed to ride aloft, a spirit there,
Creator of the choir, the full-fraught strain
That grateful rolled itself to him again.
The aged man adust upon the bank
— Whom no eye saw — at first with rapture drank
The bliss of music, then, with swelling heart,
Felt, this was his own being's greater part,
The universal joy once born in him.”

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George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.”

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George Eliot livre Scenes of Clerical Life

Janet's Repentance, Ch. 8
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”

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George Eliot livre Felix Holt, the Radical

Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

“Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.”

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George Eliot livre Scenes of Clerical Life

"Janet's Repentance" Ch. 25
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousand things--as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them. Happily, there is a common language between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“Apropos of the "The Lifted Veil," I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies, and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea: —
"Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers save the growing heritage
That makes complete manhood."
But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form. But we must wait a little. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances, much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition.”

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George Eliot

Comments on The Lifted Veil with a motto for it used in the "Cabinet Edition" of her works (1878), in a letter to John Blackwood (28 February 1873), published in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885), Vol. 4

“Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return...”

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George Eliot livre Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.”

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George Eliot livre Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his fingerends. Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had. For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels? Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff. The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted— as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“It is the glory of the heritage
Thy life has left, that makes thy outcast age:
Thy limbs shall lie dark, tombless on this sod,
Because thou shinest in man's soul, a god,
Who found and gave new passion and new joy
That nought but Earth's destruction can destroy.
Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone:
'Twas but in giving that thou couldst atone
For too much wealth amid their poverty.”

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George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

Book VI, ch. vi
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“The mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.”

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George Eliot livre Daniel Deronda

Bk. 2, Ch. 13
Daniel Deronda (1876)

“I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known— ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“It was entirely from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family of three sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting money to an expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in giving him extravagant idle habits. You are now reaping the consequences.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep — only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky — before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 13 (at page 118)

“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 16 – Page numbers as per the 1996 Penguin Classics Edition)

“There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Twas easy following where invention trod
— All eyes can see when light flows out from God.
And thus did Jubal to his race reveal
Music their larger soul, where woe and weal
Filling the resonant chords, the song, the dance,
Moved with a wider-winged utterance.”

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George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 12 (at page 107)

“Her heart lived in no cherished secrets of its own, but in feelings which it longed to share with all the world.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.”

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George Eliot livre Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“"Jubal," the face said, "I am thy loved Past,
The soul that makes thee one from first to last.
I am the angel of thy life and death,
Thy outbreathed being drawing its last breath.
Am I not thine alone, a dear dead bride
Who blest thy lot above all men's beside?”

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George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 19)

“Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

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