Status Updates From Middlemarch (Dover Thrift E...

But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance. Chapter 45

Horace, therefore, Juvenal, and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem to indigitate and point at our times.
—SIR THOMAS BROWNE: Pseudodoxia Epidemica chapter 45

It is the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do, without the borrowed help and satire of times past; condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue the community of vice in both…

Still, if I believe that I can set going a better method of treatment—if I believe that I can pursue certain observations and inquiries which may be a lasting benefit to medical practice, I should be a base truck-ler if I allowed any consideration of personal comfort to hinder me.
And the course is all the clearer from there being no salary in question to put my persistence in an equivocal light." 413-414

"I suppose one must expect to fight one's way; there is hardly anything to be done without it. And the ignorance of people about here is stupendous. I don't lay claim to anything else than having used some opportunities which have not come within everybody's reach; but there is no stifling the offence of being young, and a new-comer, and happening to know something more than the old inhabitants…

RACINEEEE SHOUTOUT!

"When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her atributes-one is conscious of her presence."

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

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…

Even if I live I shall not be without uneasiness as to what he may attempt through indirect influence.

This is a very bare and therefore a very incomplete way of putting the case. The human soul moves in many channels, and Mr. Casau-bon, we know, had a sense of rectitude and an honourable pride in satisfying the requirements of honour, which compelled him to find other reasons for his conduct than those of jealousy and vindictive-ness.

If the truth should be that some undermining disease was at work within him, there might be large opportunity for some people to be the happier when he was gone; and if one of those people should be Will Ladislaw, Mr. Casaubon objected so strongly that it seemed as if the annoyance would make part of his disembodied existence.