Middlemarch

by George Eliot

all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properly speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter.

but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gunk or starch in the form of tradition.

"But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing? Well, it lies a little in our family. I had it myself—that love of knowledge, and going into everything—a little too much—it took me too far; though that sort of thing doesn't often run in the female-line; or it runs underground like the rivers in Greece, you know—it comes out in the sons. Clever sons, clever mothers.

what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination."

Has the theory of the solar system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact?

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

But these kinds of inspiration Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space.

He for his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more

exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transit...

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.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

When I was young, Mr. Lydgate, there never was any question about right and wrong. We knew our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and our duty. Every respectable Church person had the same opinions.

I shall never show that disrespect to my parents, to give up what they taught me.

If you change once, why not twenty times?"

Their system is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.

and he had no power of imagining the part which the want of money plays in determining the actions of men.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves:

"That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only."

He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.

keeping up a joyous imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there must be to others in going aboard with it.

To get all the advantage of being with men of this sort, you must know how to draw your inferences, and not be a spoon who takes things literally.

Like the eccentric woman she was, she was at present absorbed in considering what was to be done, and did not fancy that the end could be better achieved by bitter remarks or explosions.

How will you know the pitch of that great bell Too large for you to stir? Let but a flute Play 'neath the fine-mixed metal listen close Till the right note flows forth, a silvery rill. Then shall the huge bell tremble—then the mass With myriad waves concurrent shall respond In low soft unison.

seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge.

Dorothea had little vanity, but she had the ardent woman's need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul.

yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would have been perilous with fear.

All through his life Mr. Casaubon had been trying not to admit even to himself the inward sores of self-doubt and jealousy.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

the judgments on it had naturally been divided, depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence.

It isn't possible to square one's conduct to silly conclusions which nobody can foresee."

he was rather happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for practical purposes,

who could find reasons impromptu, when he had not thought of a question beforehand.

I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest—I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

And I, raised in the middle of the 20th century in what was then a Fundamentalist fellowship, also agree.

he could master any subject if he chose, and he meant always to take the side of reason and justice, on which he would carry all his ardor.

"I am grateful to you for remembering my feelings."

How often have i not done this in my life when i should have.

It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from what outsiders call inconsistency—putting a dead mechanism of "ifs" and "therefores" for the living myriad of hidden suckers whereby the belief and the conduct are wrought into mutual sustainment.

What?

as age made egoism more eager but less enjoying,

She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.

"But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardor, "character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do."

Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.

Prescient!

but she had been little used to imagining other people's states of mind except as a material cut into shape by her own wishes;

Isn't that true of us all at one time or another.

Unhappily her mind slipped off it for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text.

Sounds like me in my college years at my desk wrestling with a textbook ..... and also in many instances thereafter.

"That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing to try for. If we had lost our own chief good, other people's good would remain, and that is worth trying for.

Marvelous

"Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband."

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.