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"The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest."
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"For it cannot be denied that all over the world and in all ages there are beings who are perceived to be extraordinary, charming, and appealing, and whom many honor as benevolent spirits, because they make one think of a more beautiful, a freer, a more winged life than the one we lead."

"A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still."

"What you call life is but a dream, and reality is relative."

"There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it-love-nobility-big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . ."

"Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds."

"That's the thing you girls never get. It doesn't matter if you just woke up, or just got done bawling, or just finished your make-up. When a guy's all love-sick over a chick, she looks exactly the same to him all the time: perfect."

"The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

"If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?"
Explore more quotes by George Eliot

"The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character."

"A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards."

"No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from."

"You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know."

"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."

"Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder."
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