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George Eliot citations
Page 9

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

“The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.”

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George Eliot

As quoted in Golden Gleams of Thought from the Words of Leading Orators, Divines, Philosophers, Statesmen and Poets (1881) by S. Pollock Linn; also in Still Waters http://books.google.com/books?id=VjAqAAAAYAAJ (1913)

“She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, — when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark.”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 17)

“The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink...”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 5 (at page 41)

“If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.”

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George Eliot livre Scenes of Clerical Life

"Janet's Repentance" Ch. 10 in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858); this has appeared in paraphrased form as: "The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men."
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“The difficulty is, to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state.”

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George Eliot

Journal entry, December 31, 1877

“Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name. … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.”

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George Eliot livre Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 1
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

“With thy coming Melody was come.
This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow,
And that immeasurable life to know
From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead,
A seed primeval that has forests bred.”

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George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.”

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George Eliot livre Scenes of Clerical Life

"The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" Ch. 4
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic — the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice...”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched — he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 79)

“Ah," said Dolly, with soothing gravity, "it's like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest — one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do arter all — the big things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n — they do, that they do; and I think you're in the right on it to keep the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it's been sent to you, though there's folks as thinks different.”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 14 (at page 121)

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

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George Eliot livre Middlemarch

Last lines
Middlemarch (1871)

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habbit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.”

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George Eliot livre Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.”

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George Eliot livre Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 27 (at page 219)

“So soon as Squire Cass's standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr. Osgood's, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut, pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its freshness — everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire, in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at Squire Cass's.”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 3 (at page 24)

“[Mr Johnson] "You know what a Tory is – one who wants to drive the working men as he'd drive cattle."”

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George Eliot livre Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 11 (at page 121)

“One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Certain winds will make men's temper bad.”

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George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…”

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George Eliot livre The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“His smile is sweetened by his gravity.”

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George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“no sort of duplicity can long flourish without the help of vocal falsehoods”

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George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 9 (at page 71)

“People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.”

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George Eliot livre Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

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