Quotes from George Eliot

the philanthropic banker his brother-in-law, who predominated so much in the town that some called him a Methodist, others a hypocrite, according to the resources of their vocabulary;

Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel's widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery.

Não vale a pena uma pessoa preocupar-se muito seja com o que for (...)

porque nada me dá mais a volta às tripas do que um homem que prega a sua religião sem dar descanso a ninguém e que apregoa que os dez mandamentos para ele não chegam, ao mesmo tempo que é pior do que metade dos que estão no degredo.

would be easy for any felon to say that his ancestors ought to have been hanged instead of him.

One way to approach the book today might be to think of it not as an intimidating, monolithic entity, but as its original readers experienced it—as eight utterly manageable short books to be read over the leisurely course of a year. Another way might be to admit that you do have time to read an eight-hundred-page book, perhaps even according to a swifter timetable than that of George Eliot's first readers. You just need to reorder your priorities.

In short, woman was a problem which, since Mr Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.

And your mind is a sort of world to me — You can tell me all I want to know.

in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentleman whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

Mas, minha querida Mrs. Casaubon (...) -, o carácter não é uma peça de mármore... não é algo de sólido e inalterável. É algo que está vivo e se transforma, e pode adoecer, como também acontece com o nosso corpo.

Development and catastrophe can often be measured by nothing clumsier than the moment-hand.

Quando vemos uma mulher perfeita, não pensamos nos seus atributos - estamos simplesmente conscientes da sua presença.

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature;

We know he had suffered keenly from the belief that there was a tinge of dishonour in his lot; but there are some cases, and his was one of them, in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

Tem dó do fardo alheio, porque o seu peso errante Poderá visitar-te a ti e a mim.

Happily he was modest, and took any second-rate-ness in himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted for by a superiority.

scientific insight and furnished lodgings: the incompatibility

am sure you could teach me a thousand things—as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them. Happily

passing the time without any labor of intelligence

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.

Any one who imagines ten days too short a time—not for falling into leanness, lightness, or other measurable effects of passion, but—for the whole spiritual circuit of alarmed conjecture and disappointment, is ignorant of what can go on in the elegant leisure of a young lady's mind.

Celia looked up at him like a thoughtful kitten.

as obstinately as when we look through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees