Middlemarch Quotes

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
― George Eliot

“The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.”
― George Eliot Middlemarch

“But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me."

"What is that?" said Will, rather jealous of the belief.

"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and can not do what we would, we are part of the divine struggle against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.”
― George Eliot

“Le coeur se sature d'amour comme d'un sel divin qui le conserve; de la l'incorruptible adherence de ceux qui se sont aimes des l'aube de la vie, et la fraicheur des vielles amours prolonges. Il existe un embaumement d'amour. C'est de Daphnis et Chloe que sont faits Philemon et Baucis. Cette vieillesse la, ressemblance du soir avec l'aurore.

The heart is saturated with love as if with a divine salt which preserves it; that is what makes possible the incorruptible attachment of those who have loved each other from the dawn of life, and the freshness of old loves which have lasted a long time. Love embalms. Philemon and Baucis come from Daphnis and Chloe. That sort of aging connects evening with dawn.”
― Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

“Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her—now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an early Methodist.
Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to hers. He had looked forward to her learning the truth from others, and had acquiesced in that probability, as something easier to him than any confession. But now that he imagined the moment of her knowledge come, he awaited the result in anguish. His daughters had been obliged to consent to leave him, and though he had allowed some food to be brought to him, he had not touched it. He felt himself perishing slowly in unpitied misery. Perhaps he should never see his wife's face with affection in it again. And if he turned to God there seemed to be no answer but the pressure of retribution.
It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller—he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly—
"Look up, Nicholas."
He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, "I know;" and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht beständig
Und atmest neu erquickt zu meinen Füßert,
Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschließen,
Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.

This night, thou, Earth! hast also stood unshaken,
And now thou breathest new-refreshed before me,
And now beginnest, all thy gladness granting,
A vigorous resolution to restore me,
To seek that highest life for which I'm panting.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

“It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think the emerald is more beautiful than any of them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today’s medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.”
― Richard Gunderman

“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's 'makdom and her fairnesse', never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of 'makdom and fairnesse' which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires? In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting. And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It was a newer crisis in Rosamond's experience than even Dorothea could imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered her dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself and critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifestation of feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking aversion and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred towards her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had been walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the course emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.”
― George Eliot

“I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it goes. I dare say I shall have to retract.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch, Volume 1

“For religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed;and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“...but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle — solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

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

“A lifeless embalmment of knowledge”
― George Eliot

“What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch, Volume 1

“Let the music which can take the possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once more - what does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its absence?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“... it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His school studies had not much modified that opinion...”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death- who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die- and soon," then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward- perhaps with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa,' has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walk- ing forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?”
― George Eliot

“Sự mạnh lên của cái thiện trên mặt đất một phần không nhỏ phụ thuộc vào những hành động không được sử sách ghi lại, và nếu cuộc sống của bạn và tôi nhẹ bớt phần nào gánh nặng thì phân nửa là nhờ những con người sống trọn vẹn một cuộc đời ẩn tàng, yên nghỉ trong những nấm mồ không mấy người lui tới.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pain about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, ‘oh nothing!’ Pride helps us and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Okay, what’s fictional nonfiction, then?” I asked.

“Same idea. Not all the fictional books are fiction,” explained Dr. Rust. “Some are nonfiction.”

“Huh?” Now I was thoroughly confused.

“Oh, for example . . .” Dr. Rust hesitated.

Elizabeth suggested, “The Key to All Mythologies?”

“Yes! Good one. That’s in Middlemarch, a novel by George Eliot. A fussy scholar spends his life writing it—The Key to All Mythologies, I mean. It’s nonfiction, but it exists in the novel, which is fiction. So it’s fictional nonfiction. See?”
― Polly Shulman, The Poe Estate

“[On George Eliot's Middlemarch]:

Reading it seemed like watching God creating the world in miniature.”
― Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels