George Eliot cytaty

strona 8

„Kobieta wierzy, że 2 + 2 zmieni się w 5, jeśli będzie długo płakać i zrobi awanturę.”

„Żadna beznadziejność nie jest tak smutna jak beznadziejność wczesnej młodości, kiedy w duszy są tylko pragnienia.”

„Nie mówię, że kobiety nie są głupie. Stworzono je na podobieństwo mężczyzn.”

„Nasze słowa posiadają skrzydła, lecz często lecą nie tam, gdzie chcemy.”

„Najlepszy przyjaciel – moje źródło na pustyni.”

„Moim artystycznym zamierzeniem nie jest przedstawianie nienagannie prowadzących się osób, lecz ludzi rozmaitych charakterów, których postawa wymaga od nas tolerancji, współczucia i sympatii. I nie mogę ani na krok odejść od tego, co według mnie jest prawdą o postaci.”

„Do wielu anomalii, do jakich skłonna jest natura ludzka, moraliści nigdy nie zaliczali zbytniej życzliwości wobec ludzi, którzy otwarcie lżą.”

„Cóż to za nieopisana ulga, mieć poczucie bezpieczeństwa przy innej osobie, nie musieć ważyć myśli, ani mierzyć słów, lecz wylewać je wszystkie z siebie wiedząc, że wierna dłoń przyjmie je i zachowa…”

„Wkrótce będziemy parą starych, pomarszczonych stworzeń. Nie szkodzi – im brzydsi będziemy w oczach innych, tym piękniejsi będziemy dla siebie nawzajem.”

„Kobieto, jeśli nie możesz być gwiazdą na niebie, bądź przynajmniej lampą naftową w domu!”

„Błazen to człowiek, który oczekuje, że zdarzą się rzeczy, które się nigdy nie wydarzą.”

„Po cóż żyjemy, jeśli nie po to, by życie czynić łatwiejsze dla siebie nawzajem?”

„Szczęście jest opasłą obojętnością dla cudzych trosk.”

„Wszyscy pamiętamy epoki w naszym doświadczeniu, kiedy umiera coś oczekiwanego lub rodzi się nowy motyw.”

“I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.”

“She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vaporlike through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that unappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.”

“Perhaps the wind
Wails so in winter for the summers dead,
And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries
For what has been and is not.”

“The miller's daughter of fourteen could not believe that high gentry behaved badly to their wives, but her mother instructed her — "Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness…"”

“There could have been no more complete answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else, completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy, actually put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly— he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering—and kissed each of the two large tears. This was a strange way of arriving at an understanding, but it was a short way.”

“Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.”

“Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness;”

“It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness—calling their denial knowledge.”

“He said within his soul, "'This is the end:
O'er all the earth to where the-heavens bend
And hem men's travel, I have breathed my soul:
I lie here now the remnant of that whole,
The embers of a life, a lonely pain;
As far-off rivers to my thirst were vain,
So of my mighty years nought comes to me again."”

“Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character.”

“Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them.”

“Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.”

“There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.”

“I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.”

“I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”

“There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.”

“The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,
While Jubal lonely laid him down to die.”

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”

“There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of — to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.”

“when a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy.”

“He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favourable chance which would save him from unpleasant consequences – perhaps even justify his insincerity by manifesting prudence.
In this point of trusting in some throw of fortune's dice, Godfrey can hardly be called old-fashioned. Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.”

“But then the need of being loved, the strongest need … in poor Maggie’s nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it.”

“Tis God gives skill,
But not without men's hands: He could not make
Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio.”

“It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop.”

“I see a face of love,
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong:
Yea — art thou come again to me, great Song?"
The face bent over him like silver night
In long-remembered summers; that calm light
Of days which shine in firmaments of thought,
That past unchangeable, from change still wrought.”

“It was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in another.”

“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love…”

“We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little – might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken and met death – a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness.”

“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.”