Middlemarch (Grapevine Press)

by George Eliot

She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery.

And I do not see that I should be bound by Dorothea’s opinions now we are going into society, though of course she herself ought to be bound by them. But Dorothea is not always consistent.”

I have been using up my eyesight on old characters lately;

whose work would reconcile complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint.

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge.

For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do?—she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse.

one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent:

almost everything he had said seemed like a specimen from a mine, or the inscription on the door of a museum which might open on the treasures of past

She could not pray: under the rush of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her own. She

No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the cawing of an amorous rook.

The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

“She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!”

that it should not take place after she had preconceived it, caused her an irritation which every thinker will sympathize with.

for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

her usual eagerness for a binding theory which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some bearing on her actions.

But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but knowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil;

in a year from this time that girl will hate him. She looks up to him as an oracle now, and by-and-by she will be at the other extreme. All flightiness!”

God A’mighty sticks to the land. He promises land, and He gives land, and He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.

“What did missy want with more books? What must you be bringing her more books for?” “They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading.” “A little too fond,” said Mr. Featherstone, captiously. “She was for reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She’s got the newspaper to read out loud. That’s enough for one day, I should think. I can’t abide to see her reading to herself. You mind and not bring her any more books, do you hear?” “Yes, sir, I hear.” Fred had received this order before, and had secretly disobeyed it. He intended to disobey it again.

She bowed and looked at him: he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.

cannot regard wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply as a harvest for this world.

I do not shrink from saying that it will not tend to your son’s eternal welfare or to the glory of God.

it is not an easy thing even to thread a path for principles in the intricacies of the world—still

so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under,

He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common—at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.

He was one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did

But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed to be knowledge.

are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of “makdom and fairnesse” which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?

offering the most direct alliance between intellectual conquest and the social good.

venerable colleges which used great efforts to secure purity of knowledge by making it scarce,

each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his course towards final companionship with the immortals.

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

they had a strong suspicion that since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about everything, he must have a sort of vampire’s feast in the sense of mastery.

appointments are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking. The fittest man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most agreeable.

This was one of the difficulties of moving in good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a qualification for any salaried office.

I feed a weakness or two lest they should get clamorous. See,”

In these matters he was conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny; and perhaps the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the critical strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account for their actions.

For the first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity.

At all events, it is certain that if any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill.

by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this—that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.

laughter. “Come now, my friend—you will help?” said

she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness.

But she was gradually ceasing to expect with her former delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening where she followed him. Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs,

The best piety is to enjoy—when you can.

“She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she has married him,”

that his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them.

scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we must believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it is virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish reliance on another.

Young folks may get fond of each other before they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear.

Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman’s oppressive liberty: it had not even filled her leisure with the ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness.

the force of circumstances was easily too much for him, as it is for most pleasure-loving florid men; and the circumstance called Rosamond was particularly forcible by means of that mild persistence which, as we know, enables a white soft living substance to make its way in spite of opposing rock.