Scenes of Clerical Life Quotes

“You know I have duties──we both have duties──before which feeling must be sacrificed.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself-it only requires opportunity. You do not suppose Dempster had any motive for drinking beyond the craving for drink; the presence of brandy was the only necessary condition.

And an unloving, tyrannous, brutal man needs no motive to prompt his cruelty; he needs only the perpetual presence of a woman he can call his own. A whole park full of tame or timid-eyed animals to torment at his will would not serve him so well to glut his lust of torture; they could not feel as one woman does; they could not throw out the keen retort which whets the edge of hatred.

[...] poor Janet's soul was kept like a vexed sea, tossed by a new storm before the old waves have fallen.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“We read, indeed, that the walls of Jericho fell down before the sound of trumpets,39 but we nowhere hear that those trumpets were hoarse and feeble. Doubtless they were trumpets that gave forth clear ringing tones, and sent a mighty vibration through brick and mortar. But the oratory of the Rev. Amos resembled rather a Belgian railway-horn, which shows praiseworthy intentions inadequately fulfilled.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Thank heaven, then, that a little illusion is left to us, to enable us to be useful and agreeable – that we don’t know exactly what our friends think of us – that the world is not made of looking-glass, to show us just the figure we are making, and just what is going on behind our backs! By the help of dear friendly illusion, we are able to dream that we are charming – and our faces wear a becoming air of self-possession; we are able to dream that other men admire our talents – and our benignity is undisturbed; we are able to dream that we are doing much good – and we do a little.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Mr. Bates was sober, with that manly, British, churchman-like sobriety which can carry a few glasses of grog without any perceptible clarification of ideas.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“She saw the years to come stretch before her like an autumn afternoon, filled with resigned memory. Life to her could never more have any eagerness; it was a solemn service of gratitude and patient effort. She walked in the presence of unseen witnesses—of the Divine love that had rescued her, of the human love that waited for its eternal repose until it had seen her endure to the end.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“¡Bendita sea la influencia de un alma humana buena y cariñosa en otra! No calculable por el álgebra, no deducible lógica, sino misteriosa, eficaz y poderosa, como el proceso oculto por el que una semilla diminuta prende y, al brotar, se convierte en un tallo alto de hermosas hojas con una flor de pétalos brillantes. Las ideas son a menudo pobres fantasmas; nuestros ojos deslumbrados por el sol no pueden distinguirlas; pasan a través de nosotros como un ligero vaho, sin que advirtamos su presencia. Pero algunas veces son corpóreas; exhalan su cálido aliento sobre nosotros, nos tocan con manos suaves y sensibles, nos miran con ojos tristes y sinceros, y nos hablan en un tono cautivador; están envueltas en un alma humana, con todos sus conflictos, su fe y su amor. Y entonces su presencia es un poder, entonces nos sacuden como una pasión, y las perseguimos con dulce compasión, arrastrados por ellas del mismo modo que las llamas arrastran a las llamas.”
― George Eliot, Escenas de la vida parroquial

“La vida podía significar angustia, podía significar desesperación; pero ¡ay!, tenía que aferrarse a ella, aunque le sangraran los dedos; sus pies tenían que pegarse al firme suelo para que la luz del sol volviera a calentarlos, no caer por un abismo desconocido donde ella pudiera incluso añorar las desgracias familiares”
― George Eliot, Escenas de la vida parroquial

“La crueldad, como cualquier otro vicio, no requiere ningún motivo fuera de sí misma: solo requiere una oportunidad. [...] Y un hombre frío, tirano y brutal no necesita ningún motivo para dar rienda suelta a su crueldad; solo necesita la presencia constante de una mujer que llama suya. Un parque lleno de animales mansos y de mirada asustadiza que pudiera atormentar a su antojo no colmaría igual su sed de tortura; no podrían sentir como lo hace una mujer; no podrían formular la réplica acerba que afila el odio.”
― George Eliot, Escenas de la vida parroquial

“Existe un poder en la mirada de un alma humana sincera y afectuosa que contribuye más a disipar los prejuicios y avivar la comprensión que los argumentos más elaborados.”
― George Eliot, Escenas de la vida parroquial

“For the wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“After all the packing was done and all the arrangements had been made, Amos felt the oppression of that blank interval in which one has nothing left to think of but the dreary future - the separation from the loved and familiar, and the chilling entrance on the new and strange. In every parting there is an image of death.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“The emotions, I have observed, are but slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if you stood beside that mother—if you knew her pang and shared it—it is probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in statistics.

Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on the side of satisfaction.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Legal redress is imperfect satisfaction for having one’s head broken with a brickbat.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“But it is with men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches, into which they were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with some rough boss, some odd excrescence; and what might have been a grand tree expanding into liberal shade is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk. Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow, which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding into plenteous beauty; and the trivial erring life which we visit with our harsh blame may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best limb is withered.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“to bring a furrin child into the coonthry; an' depend on't, whether you an' me lives to see't or noo, it'll coom to soom harm. The first sitiation iver I held—it was a hold hancient habbey, wi' the biggest orchard o' apples an' pears you ever see—there was a French valet, an' he stool silk stoockins, an' shirts, an' rings, an' iverythin' he could ley his hands on, an' run awey at last wi' th' missis's jewl-box. They're all alaike, them furriners. It roons i' th' blood.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“There was a voice speaking in Caterina's mind to which she had never yet given vent. That voice said continually. 'Why did he make me love him—why did he let me know he loved me, if he knew all the while that he couldn't brave everything for my sake?' Then love answered, 'He was led on by the feeling of the moment, as you have been, Caterina; and now you ought to help him to do what is right.' Then the voice rejoined, 'It was a slight matter to him. He doesn't much mind giving you up. He will soon love that beautiful woman, and forget a poor little pale thing like you.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Alas, alas! we poor mortals are often little better than wood-ashes — there is small sign of the sap, and the leafy freshness, and the bursting buds that were once there; but wherever we see wood-ashes, we know that all that early fullness of life must have been. I, at least, hardly ever look at a bent old man, or a wizened old woman, but I see also, with my mind’s eye, that Past of which they are the shrunken remnant, and the unfinished romance of rosy cheeks and bright eyes seems sometimes of feeble interest and significance, compared with that drama of hope and love which has long ago reached its catastrophe, and left the poor soul, like a dim and dusty stage, with all its sweet garden-scenes and fair perspectives overturned and thrust out of sight.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form,”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else. In the night it presses on our imagination—the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite measurable reality. The man who looks with ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“There is a power in the direct glance of a sincere and loving human soul, which will do more to dissipate prejudice and kindle charity than the most elaborate arguments.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“Persecution and revenge, like courtship and toadyism, will not prosper without a considerable expenditure of time and ingenuity,”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“the involuntary loss of any familiar object almost always brings a chill as from an evil omen; it seems to be the first finger-shadow of advancing death. From”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life

“It is probable that no speculative or theological hatred would be ultimately strong enough to resist the persuasive power of convenience:”
― George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life