George Eliot

Table of contents

1 George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) 2 Sourced: 2.1 from "O May I Join the Choir Invisible" (1867) 3 Attributed:

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

(November 22, 1819 - December 22, 1880) English novelist and poet

Sourced:

• "I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven —the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it —it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition —make haste —oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations."
  • Source: The Lifted Veil (1859)

• "They kissed each other with a deep joy.
  What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"
  • Source: from the novel Adam Bede (1859)

• "There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music."
  • Source: The Mill on the Floss (1860)

• "Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness;"
  • Source: Romola (1863)

• "I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."
  • Source: from the novel Felix Holt, The Radical (1866)

• "What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in MY trouble, and attended me in my illness."
  • Source: Middlemarch (1871)

• "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."
  • Source: Middlemarch (final lines) (1871)

• I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
  • In a letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1875)

• "The best augury of a mans success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world"
  • Source: from the novel Daniel Deronda (1876)

• "The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them - like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols."
  • Source: Daniel Deronda (1876)

• "Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion."
  • Source: Scenes from Clerical Life (Amos Barton) (1858)

from "O May I Join the Choir Invisible" (1867)

• "O may I join the choir invisible
  Of those immortal dead who live again
  In minds made better by their presence; live
  In pulses stirred to generosity,
  In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
  For miserable aims that end with self,
  In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
  And with their mild persistence urge men's search
  To vaster issues."

• "So to live is heaven:
  To make undying music in the world,
  Breathing a beauteous order that controls
  With growing sway the growing life of man."

• "This is life to come,—
  Which martyred men have made more glorious
  For us who strive to follow. May I reach
  That purest heaven, — be to other souls
  The cup of strength in some great agony,
  Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
  Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
  Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
  And in diffusion ever more intense!
  So shall I join the choir invisible
  Whose music is the gladness of the world."

Attributed:

• My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

• Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

• Those who trust us educate us.