“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.”

—  George Eliot , book Middlemarch

Prelude
Middlemarch (1871)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been b…" by George Eliot?
George Eliot photo
George Eliot 300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880

Related quotes

Earl Warren photo
Anton Chekhov photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn't, like whoever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Source: 27 February 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944

Samuel Taylor Coleridge photo
Thomas Otway photo

“What mighty ills have not been done by woman!
Who was ’t betrayed the Capitol?—A woman!
Who lost Mark Antony the world?—A woman!
Who was the cause of a long ten years’ war,
And laid at last old Troy in ashes?—Woman!
Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!”

The Orphan (1680), Act iii. Sc. 1. Compare: "O woman, woman! when to ill thy mind/ Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend", Alexander Pope, Homer’s Odyssey, book xi., line 531.

Mallika Sherawat photo

“I think a woman who's confident, who's aware of her own abilities and her own limitations and who accepts gracefully failure as part of her life. All this combination makes a beautiful woman.”

Mallika Sherawat (1976) Indian actress

[The Quest for beauty, http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/01/quest/index.html, June 16 2006]

Mark W. Clark photo

“A soldier's life in combat is an endless series of decisions that mean success or failure, and perhaps life or death for himself or his comrades.”

Mark W. Clark (1896–1984) American general

Source: Calculated Risk (1950), p. 1
Context: A soldier's life in combat is an endless series of decisions that mean success or failure, and perhaps life or death for himself or his comrades. The rifleman crawling through the rubble of a bombed-out street must decide on the best moment to escape enemy fire as he dodges from one doorway to the next. He must take a chance. The general seeking to break an enemy defense line and destroy his forces must decide just when and how to strike and precisely to what extent he dare weaken one sector of his front in order to mass overpowering strength at the main point of attack. He, too, must take a chance, although, in the stilted phraseology of military communiqués, he calls it a "calculated risk".

Albert Camus photo

“If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

Albert Camus (1913–1960) French author and journalist

"Summer in Algiers" http://books.google.com/books?id=N0bNUqDVKJgC&q=%22If+there+is+a+sin+against+life+it+consists+perhaps+not+so+much+in+despairing+of+life+as+in+hoping+for+another+life+and+in+eluding+the+implacable+grandeur+of+this+life%22&pg=PA153#v=onepage, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955)

Related topics