Interview, The Paris Review No. 80, Spring 2000 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/730/the-art-of-poetry-no-80-geoffrey-hill
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
Middlemarch (1871)
Context: What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness.
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George Eliot 300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880Related quotes

Cassandra (1860)
Context: At present we live to impede each other's satisfactions; competition, domestic life, society, what is it all but this? We go somewhere where we are not wanted and where we don't want to go. What else is conventional life? Passivity when we want to be active. So many hours spent every day in passively doing what conventional life tells us, when we would so gladly be at work.
And is it a wonder that all individual life is extinguished?

“The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 246

“The less we depend on each other, the less connected we become.”

Letter to A.S. Suvorin (December 9, 1890)
Letters

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”