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| George Eliot
'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence. A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections. A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt. All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other. An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment. Animals are such agreeable friends, they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms. Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat. Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact. But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves. But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man. Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections. Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other. Excessive literary production is a social offense. Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult. Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker. Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. Hate is like fire--it makes even light rubbish deadly.He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence. I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning. I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved. I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men. 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. If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place. Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities. In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.In every parting there is an image of death.In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal. It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty. It is never too late to be what we might have been.It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident. Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being. {from "Felix Holt, The Radical," ch. 48, 1866} No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters. Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution. Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud. Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.Particular lies may speak a general truth.Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in. Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends? She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise. The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance. The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions. There are many victories worse than a defeat. There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms. There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism. To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy. Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?What makes life dreary is the want of a motive. What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs? When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks. Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night. You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl. |
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