Camden Nauroth’s Reviews > Middlemarch > Status Update

Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettantism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

"I just do what comes before me to do. I can't help people's ignorance and spite any more than Vesalius could. It isn't possible to square one's conduct to silly conclusions which nobody can foresee."

a fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other people. The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get quicksilver out of it."

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…

"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