"George Eliot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sight it would seem hard to trace any illustration of the doctrine of heredity in the case of this master of romance. George Eliot's dictum that we are, each one of us, but an omnibus carrying down the traits of our ancestors, does not appear at all to hold here. This fanciful realist, this naive-wistful humorist, this dreamy mystical ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections." So wrote George Eliot in "Daniel Deronda." And the truth of the apothegm may account for much of the friction in the intercourse of John Bull and Brother Jonathan. For, undoubtedly, there is a wide difference between the humour of the Englishman and the humour of the American. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Neither Browning nor George Eliot is unknown by sight to the reading world of London: neither was Thackeray nor Dickens. Did either of these ever make outcry at the friendly if vulgar glances? Yet it is true that no one of them, save Dickens, has been so widely read, and it is probable that Browning, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... career from this time, and the state of Florence up to the day of his death, the two authors here selected give faithful and vivid narratives. In Romola George Eliot portrays the character and acts of this great reformer with a legitimate intensifying, for artistic purposes, of the certified facts ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... side of the meadow, with white blinds and a row of sun-flowers along the wall; but Beth was not absorbed in the view, and gave no heed to the book beside her. She was dreaming. She had just been reading the life of George Eliot, her favorite author, and the book lay open at her picture. She had begun to love George Eliot like a personal friend; she was her ideal, her model, for Beth had some repute as a literary character in Briarsfield. Not a teacher in the village school but had marked her strong literary powers, ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... suburb, now a part of London, to the S.W. It is famous for its literary associations. Swift, Thomas Carlyle, Leigh Hunt, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and many other distinguished writers lived in Chelsea at various times. It contains a great hospital, to which Stevenson seems to ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the same time how they might be corrected. The artists invariably discovered that Her Majesty's suggestions were of the highest value. In literature her interests were more restricted. She was devoted to Lord Tennyson; and, as the Prince Consort had admired George Eliot, she perused "Middlemarch:" she was disappointed. There is reason to believe, however, that the romances of another female writer, whose popularity among the humbler classes of Her Majesty's subjects was at one time enormous, secured, no less, the approval of Her Majesty. Otherwise ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... man who intends to enter the pulpit to read carefully the best life of this wonderful preacher, reformer, and statesman. And supplement your study of him and his methods by reading George Eliot's historical novel, "Romola." ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... his dreams, and Lamartine and Alfieri made similar statements. The Henriade was suggested to Voltaire in a dream; Newton and Cardano solved the most difficult problems in a similar manner; and Mrs. Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, and George Sand asserted that their novels had been written in a dream-like state, and that they themselves were ignorant of the ultimate fate of their personages. In a preface to one of her books Mrs. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... experience is that it is a process of change. For the 'trower' at any moment, truth, like the visible area round a man walking in a fog, or like what George Eliot calls 'the wall of dark seen by small fishes' eyes that pierce a span in the wide Ocean,' is an objective field which the next moment enlarges and of which it is the critic, and which then either suffers alteration or is continued unchanged. The critic ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... have been more than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can only stammer American; nor am I certain that the bygone duchesses ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... decline to illegitimatise his offspring by espousing his deceased wife's sister, or betrothed lovers may be parted by some such mysterious barrier as sprang up between Talbot Bulstrode and Aurora Floyd, or an Adam Bede, in spite of the example set by George Eliot's hero, may refrain from marrying Dinah for fear of breaking his brother ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... comes, and no one ever understood children better or painted them half so well: they are no mites of puny perfection, no angels astray, no Psyches in all the agonies of the bursting chrysalis, but real little flesh-and-blood people in pinafores, approached by nobody's hand so nearly as George Eliot's. They are flawless: the boy who, having swung himself giddy, felt "the world turning round, as papa says it does, nurse,"—the other boy, who, immured in studies and dreams, found all life to be "a fairy-tale book with half the leaves uncut,"—the charming little snow-drop of a Carlotta, "who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn Of miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge men's minds To vaster issues. —GEORGE ELIOT ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... and Hall, secured an experienced editor in George Henry Lewes, who had contributed extensively to most of the reviews then in progress. The success of the new review was assured by the presence of such names as Walter Bagehot, George Eliot, Sir John Herschel, Mr. Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer on its list of contributors. It provided articles of timely interest in politics, literature, art and science; in its early volumes appeared serially Anthony Trollope's Belton Estate and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... and the Novelas Ejemplares, of the rogues and bandits of the Lazarillo de Tormes, who through Gil Blas invaded France and England, where they rollicked through the novel until Mrs. Grundy and George Eliot packed them off to the reform school. But the rogues of the seventeenth century were jolly rogues. They always had their tongues in their cheeks, and success rewarded their ingenious audacities. The moulds ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... a silly phrase about George Eliot, who surely was no more than one of those dull clever people, unlit by any ray of genius, I might say with Swinburne I have nothing to regret, nothing to withdraw. Maybe a few flippant remarks about my private friends; ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... George Eliot, in "Daniel Deronda," mentions it as "that wonderful bit of autobiography—the life of the Polish Jew, Solomon Maimon:" and Milman, in his "History of the Jews," refers to it as a ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... cannot, like George Eliot, write Adam Bede, we can, like Elizabeth Fry, visit the poor and the prisoner. If we cannot, like Rosa Bonheur, paint a "Horse Fair," and receive ten thousand dollars, we can, like Mrs. Stowe and Miss Alcott, do some kind of work to lighten the burdens of parents. If poor, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... from the novelist who called herself "George Eliot" we have slightly changed for our purpose. It is purely descriptive. It is a painting in words—a vivid picture of a very pretty scene. How grateful we are to those who can, as it were, turn a page of a book into canvas, and paint on it a rich verbal picture that ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... Parsee boy almost in the shadow of the Taj Mahal reading a copy of the London edition of Mrs. Wilson's Vashti. . . . Her style has been severely criticised as pedantic, but certainly this charge may with equal justice be brought against George Meredith, Bulwer, and George Eliot, and it is well established that Mrs. Wilson's books have in many instances stimulated her young readers to study history, mythology, and the sciences, from which she so frequently draws ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... that George Eliot took a hint from this poem in the composition of Daniel Deronda, for the relations between Grandcourt and Gwendolen are exactly the same as existed between the Duke and his late wife; a more recent, though not so great an example, may be found ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... its description of Necton Fair, will forcibly remind many readers of George Eliot. Taken altogether it is a delightful story."—Western ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... attitude of benevolent neutrality. But Mrs. Holmes, Randall's mother, and her sisters, the daughters of an eminent publicist who seems to have reared his eminence on bones of talk flung at him by Carlisle, George Eliot, Lewes, Monckton Milnes, and is now, doubtless, recording their toe-prints on the banks of Acheron, I never could and never can abide. My angel of a wife saw good in them, and she loved the tiny Randall, of whom I too was fond; so, for her sake, I always treated ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... purposes of Art, has practically disappeared. The social strata from which George Eliot and Dickens drew their characters no longer interests the great B. P. Hetty Sorrell, Little Em'ly, would be pronounced "provincial;" a Deronda or a ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... Mr. Garrick would never have been taken for an actor in his coach and four, so our heroine did not in the least resemble George Eliot, for instance, as she sat before her mirror at high noon with Monsieur Cadron and her maid Mathilde in worshipful attendance. Some of the ladies, indeed, who have left us those chatty memoirs of the days before ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... juvenile poems; Macaulay was simply a brilliant young man who had written some stirring verse and splendid prose; the Brontes were schoolgirls; Thackeray was dreaming of becoming an artist; Dickens had not written a line of fiction; Browning and George Eliot were yet ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... like that. Yes; don't deny it: you mean to be a writer! I'm sure you can succeed at that. Lots of women do; some of the best writers are women. You will write novels like—like—George Eliot." ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... and characteristics of— Absolutism detested by, xxxi, xxxiv admiration of, for George Eliot and for Gladstone, basis of, xxiii Catholicism of, xii-xiv, xix, xx, xxvii, xxviii; attitude of, to doctrine of Papal Infallibility, xxv, xxvi; reality of his faith, xviii et seq. ideals cherished by, document ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... know where that portrait is, tell me. I want it. I have tried to trace it—vainly. What became of it? I thought I might find this out in George Henry Lewes' 'Life of Goethe.' But Lewes had a hero-worship for Goethe: he thought him greater than George Eliot, and in the whole book there is but one cold mention of Tischbein's name. Mr. Oscar Browning, in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' names Tischbein as Goethe's 'constant companion' in the early days at Rome—and says ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Madame Bodichon, dated April 6, 1868, George Eliot writes: "What I should like to be sure of as a result of higher education for women—a result that will come to pass over my grave—is their recognition of the great amount of social unproductive labor which needs to be done by women, ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... experience. One of the most skillful teachers of my acquaintance is a woman down in the grades. I have watched her work for days at a time, striving to learn its secret. I can find nothing there that is due to genius,—unless we accept George Eliot's definition of genius as an infinite capacity for receiving discipline. That teacher's success, by her own statement, is due to a mastery of technique, gained through successive years of growth checked ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... comedy; but they will take a transcript from life and end when they get through, without informing the reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try to interest this reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and Anthony Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in sociology, honest reports of the writers' impressions, which may not be without ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... dead—Moses is dead, Solon is dead, Confucius and Justinian are dead—and I'm nae feelin' that vera weel mysel'," which in March, 1893, Punch republished, adapting it, however, to modern literature—the speaker quaintly including George Eliot amongst our deceased "best men." More recently a precisely parallel anecdote has been attributed to Dr. McCosh, apropos of Leibnitz's theory of evil ("Westminster Gazette," January, 1895). And again, there ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... idiosyncrasies, inherited from a clever father, so it was just as well that she preferred Archie to Frank. Had the latter young gentleman married her, he would have dwindled to Lady Random's husband, and would have found too late that he had domesticated a kind of imitation George Eliot. When he congratulated Archie on his engagement somewhat ruefully, he little thought what an escape he ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... statesman, earning credit for finance, Dickens was writing Hard Times, Carlyle was beginning his Frederick, Ruskin was at work on Modern Painters, Browning composing his Men and Women, Thackeray publishing The Newcomes, George Eliot wondering whether she was capable of imagination. It all seems very long ago since that October night when that woman sailed for Boulogne with her thirty-eight chosen nurses on the way to Scutari. I suppose that never in the world's history has the change in thought and manners been ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the name of George Eliot, was born at Aubury Farm, near Nuneaton, England, November 22, 1819. She was carefully educated and was a most earnest student. While her poems are beautiful, her best work is in prose, and she ranks as one of England's greatest novelists. Her most famous novels are "Adam Bede," "The Mill ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... George Eliot speaks of the indifference with which we gaze at our unintroduced neighbor, "while Destiny stands by, sarcastic, with our dramatis personae folded in her hands." It was such an hour of destiny as this when, at a dinner given by Sergeant Talfourd, at his home (No. 56) in Russell Square, Browning ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... is, and, until the masses are more educated in theological niceties than they are at present, necessarily must be, as of a Supreme Being totally distinct from God the Father. This applies in a less degree to the third Person in the Trinity; less, because His individuality is less clear. George Eliot has, with her usual penetration, noted this fact in "Silas Marner," where, in Mrs. Winthrop's simple theological system, the Trinity is always ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... Jews a belief in human development and progress, with the Jews filling the role of the Messianic people, but only as primus inter pares. It is the expression of a genuine optimism. 'Character, no less than Career,' said George Eliot, 'is a process and an unfolding.' So with the Character of mankind as a whole. But this idea of development, unfolding, is quite modern in the real sense of the terms; it is something outside the range even of the second Isaiah. Judaism was never ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... insignificance of her own acquirements, and the value of the qualities she has not got,—qualities which her husband very likely possesses, only he has not the feminine power of expression. How often a woman's seeming superiority lies in this gift of words, which, as George Eliot says, is in her, "often a fatal aptitude for expressing what she neither believes nor feels." The man often silently knows, and lives, the noble sentiment, which the woman fluently utters, imagining herself ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... make fame and fortune if, like Bunyan and Milton and Dickens and George Eliot and Scott and Emerson, they would write their own lives in their MSS., if they would write about things they have seen, that they have felt, that they have known. It is life thoughts that stir and convince, that move and persuade, that carry their very iron particles into ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... more securely by patient analysis; and though we have said that Mrs. Ward is most successful in female portraiture, her own mind and culture have an unmistakable virility and grasp and scientific firmness. This indispensable intellectual process, which will be relished by admirers of George Eliot, is relieved constantly by the sense of a charming landscape background, for the most part English. Mrs. Ward has been a true disciple in the school of Wordsworth, and really undergone its influence. Her Westmorland scenery is ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... acquaintance, with Sir Thomas More, Erasmus, Hans Holbein, Thomas Shadwell (forgotten laureate), Carlyle, Whistler, Edwin Abbey, George Meredith, Swinburne, Holman Hunt, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, Oscar and Willie Wilde, Count d'Orsay, George Eliot, and a host of lesser but equally adorable personalities whose names must come "among those present." It should show us its famous places. It should afford us peep-holes into the studios of famous artists—Augustus John's studio ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... When George Eliot uttered surprise at seeing no lines on his forehead, his reply was:—"I suppose it is because I am never puzzled."—"It has never been my way," he continues, "to set before myself a problem and puzzle out ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... first, perhaps, and to George Eliot most of all, we should find ourselves indebted for faithful studies of plain people,—studies made with an eye single to {3} the object, and leaving, therefore, no unlovely trait slurred over or excused, yet giving us that perfect understanding of every-day ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Tom's Cabin Ossian Shakespeare Ik Marvel Dickens Wordsworth, Lowell, Chaucer Macaulay. Critics and Reviews. A Non-literary Episode Thackeray "Lazarillo De Tormes" Curtis, Longfellow, Schlegel Tennyson Heine De Quincey, Goethe, Longfellow. George Eliot, Hawthorne, Goethe, Heine Charles Reade Dante Goldoni, Manzoni, D'azeglio "Pastor Fido," "Aminta," "Romola," "Yeast," "Paul Ferroll" Erckmann-chatrian, Bjorstjerne Bjornson Tourguenief, Auerbach Certain Preferences and Experiences Valdes, Galdos, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sociologist cannot neglect. As yet there is no autobiography or biography of an egocentric personality so convincing as George Meredith's The Egoist. The miser is a social type; but there are no case studies as sympathetic and discerning as George Eliot's Silas Marner. Nowhere in social science has the technique of case study developed farther than in criminology; yet Dostoevsky's delineation of the self-analysis of the murderer in Crime and Punishment dwarfs all comparison outside of similar studies in fiction. The function of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... established; and no variation of detail, however skilful, greatly affects this result. In our own days we have seen that, in spite of both authors, the public declined to believe that the Harold Skimpole of Charles Dickens, and George Eliot's Dinah Morris, were not perfectly recognisable copies of ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... craft, but never before the reality. A fine sight-and it made me think of Mark Twain's incomparable masterpiece, Life on the Mississippi, for which I would sacrifice the entire works of Thackeray and George Eliot. We ran into a big town, full of electric signs, and stopped. Albany! One minute late! I descended to watch the romantic business of changing engines. I felt sure that changing the horses of a fashionable mail-coach ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... We see no white-robed angels now; yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, and they are gently guided toward a bright and calm land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be that of a little child.—GEORGE ELIOT ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... next to the power of thought and expression, is the happiest gift an author's fairy godmother can bestow upon him, saves Kielland from saying too much—from enforcing his lesson by marginal comments, a la George Eliot. But he must be obtuse indeed to whom this reticence is not more eloquent and effective than a page ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... occasionally acts the part of 'one.' The following sentence presents a curious alternation of 'we' with 'one'—possibly not accidental (George Eliot): 'It's a desperately vexatious thing that, after all one's reflections and quiet determinations, we should be ruled by moods that one can't calculate on beforehand.' By the use of 'we' here, a more pointed reference is suggested, ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... are the advances in knowledge made by Plato, Aristotle, Roger Bacon, and Thomas Edison. He shows Himself through Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul, but also through Homer, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Beethoven, Darwin, George Eliot, William James, and Henry Irving. I take the names at random as illustrating different branches of endeavour, and if I use only great ones it is not that the lesser are excluded. No one department of human effort ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... sermon on "Woman and Skepticism," in which he unequivocally took the ground that freedom for woman led to skepticism and immorality. He illustrated his position by pointing to Hypatia, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Mme. Roland, Frances Power Cobbe, and Victoria Woodhull. He made a grave mistake in the last names mentioned, as Mrs. Woodhull was a devout believer in the Christian religion, and surely anyone conversant with Miss Cobbe's writings ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... the qualities that distinguish Emily Bronte are not those which are of the first necessity to a novelist. She is without experience; her range of character is narrow and local; she has no atmosphere of broad humanity like George Eliot; she has not Jane Austen's happy gift of making us love in a book what we have overlooked in life; we do not recognise in her the human truth and passion, the never-failing serene bitterness of humour, that have made ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... from Jewin Street to his last abode in Bunhill Fields. These are not vain repetitions if they serve to remind a single reader how all the enchantments of association lie about him. Englishwomen have been found searching about Florence for the street where George Eliot represents Romola as having lived, who have admitted never having been to Jewin Street, where the author of Lycidas and Paradise Lost ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell |
