Source: Social Problems (1883), Ch. 21 : Conclusion
Context: Many there are, too depressed, too embruted with hard toil and the struggle for animal existence, to think for themselves. Therefore the obligation devolves with all the more force on those who can. If thinking men are few, they are for that reason all the more powerful. Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power. That for every idle word men may speak they shall give an account at the day of judgment, seems a hard saying. But what more clear than that the theory of the persistence of force, which teaches us that every movement continues to act and react, must apply as well to the universe of mind as to that of matter? Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, may extend, it is not given to him here to see. But it may be that the Lord of the Vineyard will know.
“Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.”
Janet's Repentance, Ch. 8
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)
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George Eliot 300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880Related quotes
1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)
Source: Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), p. 107
“Oh, moment of sweet peril, perilous sweet! When woman joins herself to man.”
The Wanderer, Prologue, Stanza 1, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man;”
The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)
Context: It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an elemental atom, than that this atom should embrace in its organization, and evolve, all the noble forms of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life.
Letter to Dwight Martin (21 February 1964), p. 440
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)
Vol. II, John XII: 20–26, p. 334
Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: St. John (1865–1873)