“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.”

—  George Eliot, book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

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 "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and musc…" by George Eliot?
George Eliot photo
George Eliot300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880

Related quotes

Baldur von Schirach photo

“To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us.”

Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974) German Nazi leader convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg trial

Quoted in "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership" - by Joachim C. Fest - History - 1999 - Page 220

“Memory is a part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our hearts pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work to: it keeps us who we are.~Candle”

Gregory Maguire book Son of a Witch

Source: Son of a Witch

Guy P. Harrison photo

“We have magnificent brains—and use them to believe nonsense and behave as fools. . . . We are enslaved to delusions and too often the servants of subconscious biases. . . . Our great challenge is to use our brains to overcome our brains.”

Guy P. Harrison (1963) American skeptic author

“… love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together.”

Emily Giffin (1972) American writer

Source: Love the One You're With

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Francesca Lia Block photo

“What shall we do, all of us? All of us oassionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, our watermelon hearts?”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Variant: What shall we do? All of us passionate girls who fear crushing the boys we love with our mouths like caverns of teeth, our mushrooming brains, and watermelon hearts?
Source: Blood Roses

Ben Carson photo

“God has given to every one of us more than fourteen billion cells and connections in our brain. Now why would God give us such a complex organ system unless He expects us to use it?”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 154

Walter Bagehot photo

“The purse strings tie us to our kind.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

Literary Studies (1879)

Angela Merkel photo

“History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom.”

Angela Merkel (1954) Chancellor of Germany

Remarks by President Obama and Chancellor Merkel in an Exchange of Toasts on June 07, 2011. http://www.newsroomamerica.com/story/137358/remarks_by_president_obama_and_chancellor_merkel_in_an_exchange_of_toasts.html <br class="br">Context: History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in about 22 years ago. […] The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the Iron Curtain that divided Germany and Europe, and indeed the world, into two blocs.

Justin D. Fox photo

“We are part of nature and it is part of us. Everything about our species, from the shape of our teeth to the size of our brains, has been fashioned over millennia by our interaction with the plants and animals around us. What’s more, our sense of beauty and our greatest artistic achievements have been crafted in response to nature. Our yearning for wilderness is a hankering after the place we have come from, and from which we have become alienated in the headlong march of so-called progress.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Impossible Five (2015)

Related topics