Impressions of Theophrastus Such Quotes

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“Perhaps we are not fond of proletaries and their tendency to form Unions, but the world is not therefore to be rid of them.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“millions scattered from east to west—and again, are there in the political relations of the world, the conditions present or approaching for the restoration of a Jewish state planted on the old ground as a centre of national feeling, a source of dignifying protection,”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“The pride which identifies us with a great historic body is a humanising, elevating habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole;”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“All which is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a servile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where the clause, "No Irish need apply," parallels the sentence which for many polite persons sums up the question of Judaism—"I never did like the Jews.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“Again, it has been held that we have a peculiar destiny as a Protestant people, not only able to bruise the head of an idolatrous Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors of the most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over the world and convert mankind to our way of thinking.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“A common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various activity which makes a complete man.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished people: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished others.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“A man cannot show his vanity in a tight skirt which forces him to walk sideways down the staircase; but let the match be between the respective vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here too the battle would be to the strong.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“The Channel Islands' never left her. As the years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distance for her neighbours' memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the foreground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the possibility of lending them her book, entering into all details concerning it, and requesting them to read her album of "critical opinions.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“having bound himself to express judgments which will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted his perceptions by continual preoccupation.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“Ganymede was once a girlishly handsome precocious youth. That one cannot for any considerable number of years go on being youthful, girlishly handsome, and precocious, seems on consideration to be a statement as worthy of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, "Socrates was mortal.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“the polyglot education of the present day; but I observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring acceptance solely by virtue of the French language,”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order of character can coexist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception, conviction, and impulse.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“This determination of partisanship by temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is always in danger of getting so enthralled by his own words that he looks into facts and questions not to get rectifying knowledge, but to get evidence that will justify his actual attitude which was assumed under an impulse dependent on something else than knowledge.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“Giving a pleasant voice to what we are all well assured of, makes a sort of wholesome air for more special and dubious remark to move in.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact—”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“It was therefore with renewed curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject—the universal erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that process.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“I am always glad to believe that the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]

“Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes,”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such [with Biographical Introduction]