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Adam Bede QUOTES

Adam Bede QUOTES

1 " What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting? "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

2 " It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

3 " There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

4 " Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it... There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

5 " A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

6 " A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

7 " In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

8 " Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

9 " Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

10 " In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

11 " If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

12 " Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

13 " When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

14 " She hates everything that is not what she longs for. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

15 " Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

16 " We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

17 " A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

18 " The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

19 " He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede

20 " Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own. "

― George Eliot , Adam Bede