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Title: Gems from George Eliot
Author: Eliot, George [Evans, Mary Anne] (1819-1880)
Date of first publication: 1910
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London and Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press
Date first posted: 3 September 2016
Date last updated: 3 September 2016
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1350

This ebook was produced by Al Haines


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






[Illustration: Frontispiece]




[Illustration: Title page]




  GEMS
  FROM
  GEORGE ELIOT



  London and Glasgow
  Collins' Clear-Type Press




To people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious
feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that
simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have
never been severed by an act of reflection.

      *      *      *

If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their
sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false
ideas for which no man is culpable.

      *      *      *

A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of
abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but
only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for
refuge and nurture.

      *      *      *

The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that
accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary
absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder
minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and
discontents.

      *      *      *

Yes, there was a sort of refuge which always comes with the prostration
of thought under an overpowering passion: it was that expectation of
impossibilities, that belief in contradictory images, which is still
distinct from madness, because it is capable of being dissipated by the
external fact.

      *      *      *

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.

      *      *      *

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours
with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of
ourselves, before it can pass our lips.  We can send black puddings and
pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language
is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.

      *      *      *

Reverent love has a politeness of its own which it teaches to men
otherwise of small schooling.

      *      *      *

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a
wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

      *      *      *

Just and self-reproving thoughts do not come to us too thickly, even in
the purest air and with the best lessons of heaven and earth.

      *      *      *

No disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness
hangs on duplicity.

      *      *      *

She was soothed into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human
beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of
a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in
the earth or sky--before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered
eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.

      *      *      *

The prevarication and white lies, which a mind that keeps itself
ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false
touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere
trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

      *      *      *

When events turn out so much better for a man than he has had reason to
dread, is it not a proof that his conduct has been less foolish and
blameworthy than it might otherwise have appeared?

When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not
altogether unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat
ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.

      *      *      *

"It's like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking,
and the rain and the harvest--one goes and the other comes, and we know
nothing how nor where.  We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's
little we can do arter all."

      *      *      *

Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender
thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap
the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?

      *      *      *

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led
them away from the city of destruction.  We see no white-winged angels
now.  But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is
put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and
bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a
little child's.

      *      *      *

That famous ring that pricked its owner when he forgot duty and
followed desire--I wonder if it pricked very hard when he set out on
the chase, or whether it pricked but lightly then, and only pierced to
the quick when the chase had long been ended, and hope, folding her
wings, looked backward and became regret?

      *      *      *

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an
ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of
the fruit.

      *      *      *

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of
the least-instructed human beings.

      *      *      *

Excessive rumination and self-questioning is perhaps a morbid habit
inevitable to a mind of much moral sensibility when shut out from its
due share of outward activity and of practical claims on its
affections--inevitable to a noble-hearted, childless woman, when her
lot is narrow.

      *      *      *

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of
system.

      *      *      *

She had been bred up to regard even a distant kinship with crime as a
dishonour.

      *      *      *

Villagers never swarm; a whisper is unknown among them, and they seem
almost as incapable of an undertone as a cow or a stag.  Your true
rustic turns his back on his interlocutor, throwing a question over his
shoulder, as if he meant to run away from the answer, and walking a
step or two farther off when the interest of the dialogue culminates.

      *      *      *

"It's a deep mystery--the way the heart of man turns to one woman out
of all the rest he's seen i' the world, and makes it easier for him to
work seven year for _her_, like Jacob did for Rachel, sooner than have
any other woman for th' asking."

      *      *      *

Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence
of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm, majestic statues, or
Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they
are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty:
our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence,
our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses
itself in the sense of divine mystery.

      *      *      *

If I have read religious history aright--faith, hope, and charity have
not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three
concords; and it is possible, thank Heaven! to have very erroneous
theories and very sublime feelings.

      *      *      *

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.  Nature, that great
tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us
by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and
ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

      *      *      *

One of the lessons a woman most rarely learns, is never to talk to an
angry or a drunken man.

      *      *      *

Women who are never bitter and resentful are often the most querulous;
and if Solomon was as wise as he is reputed to be, I feel sure that
when he compared a contentious woman to a continual dropping on a very
rainy day, he had not a vixen in his eye--a fury with long nails, acrid
and selfish.  Depend upon it, he meant a good creature, who had no joy
but in the happiness of the loved ones whom she contributed to make
uncomfortable, putting by all the tid-bits for them, and spending
nothing on herself.

      *      *      *

"Prayer mayna bring money, but it brings us what no money can buy--a
power to keep from sin, and be content with God's will, whatever He may
please to send."

      *      *      *

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

      *      *      *

"A pig may poke his nose into the trough and think o' nothing outside
it; but if you've got a man's heart and soul in you, you can't be easy
a-making your own bed an' leaving the rest to lie on the stones."

      *      *      *

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness
that we repent of, but our severity.

      *      *      *

"As for farming, it's putting money into your pocket wi' your right
hand and fetching it out wi' your left.  As fur as I can see, it's
raising victual for other folks, and just getting a mouthful for
yourself and your children as you go along."

      *      *      *

We must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of
those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a
very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a
touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

      *      *      *

"It's all very fine having a ready-made rich man, but may happen he'll
be a ready-made fool; and it's no use filling your pocket full o' money
if you've got a hole in the corner.  It'll do you no good to sit in a
spring cart o' your own, if you've got a soft to drive you: he'll soon
turn you over into the ditch.  I allays said I'd never marry a man as
had got no brains; for where's the use of a woman having brains of her
own if she's tackled to a geek as everybody's a-laughing at?  She might
as well dress herself fine to sit back'ards on a donkey."

      *      *      *

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be
injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all
our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on
the smallest relic of their presence.

      *      *      *

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays
at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurance that it all the
while disbelieves.

      *      *      *

Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers
and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were
a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning.
Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet
peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two
brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple
with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.

      *      *      *

To the feminine mind, in some of its moods, all things that might be,
receive a temporary charm from comparison with what is.

      *      *      *

It is well known that great scholars who have shown the most pitiless
acerbity in their criticism of other men's scholarship, have yet been
of a relenting and indulgent temper in private life; and I have heard
of a learned man meekly rocking the twins in the cradle with his left
hand, while with his right he inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on
an opponent who had betrayed a brutal ignorance of Hebrew.

      *      *      *

Weaknesses and errors must be forgiven--alas! they are not alien to
us--but the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous subject of
the Hebrew points must be treated as the enemy of his race.

      *      *      *

"Folks as have no mind to be o' use, have allays the luck to be out o'
the road when there's anything to be done."

      *      *      *

There are some plants that have hardly any roots: you may tear them
from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over your
ornamental flower-pot, and they blossom none the worse.

      *      *      *

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know
all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we
may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

      *      *      *

The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till
she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.

      *      *      *

"We may determine not to gather any cherries, and keep our hands
sturdily in our pockets, but we can't prevent our mouths from watering."

      *      *      *

A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature.  He
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.

      *      *      *

Consequences are unpitying.  Our deeds carry their terrible
consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went
before--consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.  And
it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering
what may be the elements of excuse for us.

      *      *      *

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form!  Let us
cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children--in our gardens
and in our houses.  But let us love that other beauty too, which lies
in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.

      *      *      *

Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business
of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not
acknowledged.  In a piece of machinery, too, I believe there is often a
small unnoticeable wheel which has a great deal to do with the motion
of the large obvious ones.

      *      *      *

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.  Examine your words well, and
you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a
very hard thing 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.

      *      *      *

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its
subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the
unsympathising observer, who might as well put on his spectacles to
discern odours.

      *      *      *

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.

      *      *      *

"I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's
something else besides notions.  It isn't notions sets people doing the
right thing--it's feelings.  It's the same with the notions in religion
as it is with math'matics--a man may be able to work problems straight
off in 's head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he
has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a
resolution, and love something else better than his own ease."

      *      *      *

"You make but a poor trap to catch luck if you go and bait it wi'
wickedness."

      *      *      *

When our indignation is borne in submissive silence, we are apt to feel
twinges of doubt afterwards as to our own generosity, if not justice;
how much more when the object of our anger has gone into everlasting
silence, and we have seen his face for the last time, in the meekness
of death?

      *      *      *

The sound of tools to a clever workman who loves his work is like the
tentative sounds of the orchestra to the violinist who has to bear his
part in the overture: the strong fibres begin their accustomed thrill,
and what was a moment before joy, vexation, or ambition, begins its
change into energy.  All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet
from the narrow limits of our personal lot in the labour of our right
arm, the cunning of our right hand, or the still, creative activity of
our thought.

      *      *      *

The commonest man who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious
of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one.

      *      *      *

"When your broth's ready-made for you, you mun swallow the thickenin',
or else let the broth alone."

      *      *      *

Adam went to bed comforted, having woven for himself an ingenious web
of probabilities--the surest screen a wise man can place between
himself and the truth.

      *      *      *

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no
morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as
well as new forces to genius and love.  There are so many of us, and
our lots are so different: what wonder that Nature's mood is often in
harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?  We are children of
a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that
our hurts will be made much of--to be content with little nurture and
caressing, and help each other the more.

      *      *      *

Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our
consciences--out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have
caused: there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon.
Our moral sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when
others smile; but when some rude person gives rough names to our
actions, she is apt to take part against us.

      *      *      *

"I'm not th' only man that's got to do without much happiness i' this
life.  There's many a good bit o' work done with a sad heart.  It's
God's will, and that's enough for us: we shouldn't know better how
things ought to be than He does, I reckon, if we was to spend our lives
i' puzzling."

      *      *      *

Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!

      *      *      *

Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there
is sorrow and sin in the world: sorrow is then a part of love, and love
does not seek to throw it off.

      *      *      *

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first
moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it
is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have
recovered hope.

      *      *      *

"It seems as if them as aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't
wanted i' th' other world."

      *      *      *

There is a strength of self-possession which is the sign that the last
hope has departed.  Despair no more leans on others than perfect
contentment, and in despair pride ceases to be counteracted by the
sense of dependence.

      *      *      *

Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they
breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

      *      *      *

Energetic natures, strong for all strenuous deeds, will often rush away
from a hopeless sufferer, as if they were hard hearted.  It is the
overmastering sense of pain that drives them.  They shrink by an
ungovernable instinct, as they would shrink from laceration.

      *      *      *

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a
regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

      *      *      *

"A good solid bit o' work lasts: if it's only laying a floor down,
somebody's the better for it being done well, besides the man as does
it."

      *      *      *

Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an
indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing
from pain into sympathy--the one poor word which includes all our best
insight and our best love.

      *      *      *

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first
love, so few about our later love?  Are their first poems their best?
or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their
larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?  The boy's
flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a
richer, deeper music.

      *      *      *

"It's your dead chicks take the longest hatchin'."

      *      *      *

There is a wonderful amount of sustenance in the first few words of
love.

      *      *      *

Let a woman say what she will after she has once told a man that she
loves him, he is a little too flushed and exalted with that first
draught she offers him, to care much about the taste of the second: he
treads the earth with a very elastic step as he walks away from her,
and makes light of all difficulties.

      *      *      *

That is a base and selfish, even a blasphemous, spirit, which rejoices
and is thankful over the past evil that has blighted or crushed
another, because it has been made a source of unforeseen good to
ourselves.

      *      *      *

"Evil's evil, and sorrow's sorrow, and you can't alter its nature by
wrapping it up in other words."

      *      *      *

On the verge of a decision we all tremble: hope pauses with fluttering
wings.

      *      *      *

The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty,
bringing with it a sense of added strength: we can no more wish to
return to a narrower sympathy, than a painter or a musician can wish to
return to his cruder manner, or a philosopher to his less complete
formula.

      *      *      *

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they
are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labour, 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?

      *      *      *

When the towers fall, it is an ill business for the small nest-builders.

      *      *      *

A rapid intellect and ready eloquence may carry off a little impudence.

      *      *      *

Blindness acts like a dam, sending the streams of thought backward
along the already-travelled channels and hindering the course onward.

      *      *      *

The feelings that gather fervour from novelty will be of little help
towards making the world a home for dimmed and faded human beings; and
if there is any love of which they are not widowed, it must be the love
that is rooted in memories and distils perpetually the sweet balms of
fidelity and forbearing tenderness.

      *      *      *

It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish,
where it will find its world and paradise all in one, and never have a
presentiment of the dry bank.

      *      *      *

Each woman creates in her own likeness the love-tokens that are offered
to her.

      *      *      *

Even to the man who presents the most elastic resistance to whatever is
unpleasant, there will come moments when the pressure from without is
too strong for him, and he must feel the smart and the bruise in spite
of himself.

      *      *      *

When there's water enough Arno will be full, and that will not be till
the torrent is ready.

      *      *      *

The secret of oratory lies, not in saying new things, but in saying
things with a certain power that moves the hearers.

      *      *      *

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we
prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or
evil that gradually determines character.

      *      *      *

The repentance which cuts off all moorings to evil, demands something
more than selfish fear.

      *      *      *

No man ever struggled to retain power over a mixed multitude without
suffering vitiation: his standard must be their lower needs, and not
his own best insight.

      *      *      *

The touchstone by which men try us is most often their own vanity.

      *      *      *

We assume a load with confident readiness, and up to a certain point
the growing irksomeness of pressure is tolerable; but at last the
desire for relief can no longer be resisted.

      *      *      *

It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate
power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and
doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities
beyond its own horizon.

      *      *      *

It is in the nature of all human passion, the lowest as well as the
highest, that there is a point at which it ceases to be properly
egoistic, and is like a fire kindled within our being to which
everything else in us is mere fuel.

      *      *      *

Unscrupulousness gets rid of much, but not of toothache, or wounded
vanity, or the sense of loneliness, against which, as the world at
present stands, there is no security but a thoroughly healthy jaw, and
a just, loving soul.

      *      *      *

Every strong feeling makes to itself a conscience of its own--has its
own piety; just as much as the feeling of the son towards the mother
which will sometimes survive amid the worst fumes of depravation.

      *      *      *

When the stricken person is slow to recover and look as if nothing had
happened, the striker easily glides into the position of the aggrieved
party; he feels no bruise himself, and is strongly conscious of his own
amiable behaviour since he inflicted the blow.

      *      *      *

It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only
haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.

      *      *      *

Hard speech between those who have loved is hideous in the memory, like
the sight of greatness and beauty sunk into vice and rags.

      *      *      *

As a strong body struggles against fumes with the more violence when
they begin to be stifling, a strong soul struggles against phantasies
with all the more alarmed energy when they threaten to govern in the
place of thought.

      *      *      *

The light is perhaps never felt more strongly as a divine presence
stirring all those inarticulate sensibilities which are our deepest
life, than in these moments when it instantaneously awakens the shadows.

      *      *      *

That sense of mental empire which belongs to us all in moments of
exceptional clearness was intensified for him by the long days and
nights in which memory had been little more than the consciousness of
something gone.

      *      *      *

If baseness triumphed everywhere else, if it could heap to itself all
the goods of the world, and even hold the keys of hell, it would never
triumph over the hatred itself awaked.  It could devise no torture that
would seem greater than the torture of submitting to its smile.

      *      *      *

"A wise dissimulation, is the only course for moderate rational men in
times of violent party feeling."

      *      *      *

We have that power of concealment and finesse, without which a rational
cultivated man, instead of having any prerogative, is really at a
disadvantage compared with a wild bull or a savage.

      *      *      *

"Many a full sack comes from a crooked furrow; and he who will be
captain of none but honest men will have small hire to pay."

      *      *      *

Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life
of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have
once acted greatly seems to make a reason why we should always be noble.

      *      *      *

Every bond of life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that
debt; it can lie nowhere else.

      *      *      *

There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence; there are
others to whom we have need to carry our trust and reverence ready made.

      *      *      *

The relative greatness of men is not to be gauged by their tendency to
disbelieve the superstitions of their age.

      *      *      *

Perhaps of all sombre paths that on which we go back after treading it
with a strong resolution is the one that most severely tests the
fervour of renunciation.

      *      *      *

It is not force of intellect which causes ready repulsion from the
aberrations and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it is force
of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts on a face bright
with human expression; it is simply the negation of high sensibilities.

      *      *      *

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can
feel trust and reverence.

      *      *      *

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

      *      *      *

I measure men's dulness by the devices they trust in for deceiving
others.  Your dullest animal of all is he who grins and says he doesn't
mind just after he has had his shins kicked.

      *      *      *

If a prophet is to keep his power, he must be a prophet like Mahomet,
with an army at his back, that when the people's faith is fainting it
may be frightened into life again.

      *      *      *

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished
beyond the walls.

      *      *      *

Mind is an enemy to beauty!

      *      *      *

Life was so complicated a game that the devices of skill were liable to
be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the
descent of thistle-down.

      *      *      *

No man, who is not exceptionally feeble, will endure being thwarted by
his wife.  Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of
conquest.

      *      *      *

Men do not want books to make them think lightly of vice, as if life
were a vulgar joke.

      *      *      *

There is no kind of conscious obedience that is not an advance on
lawlessness.

      *      *      *

Sorrow and joy have each their peculiar narrowness; and a religious
enthusiasm like Savonarola's, which ultimately blesses mankind by
giving the soul a strong propulsion towards sympathy with pain,
indignation against wrong, and the subjugation of sensual desire, must
always incur the reproach of a great negation.

      *      *      *

Wherever affection can spring, it is like the green leaf and the
blossom--pure, and breathing purity, whatever soil it may grow in.

      *      *      *

In the career of a great public orator who yields himself to the
inspiration of the moment, that conflict of selfish and unselfish
emotion which in most men is hidden in the chamber of the soul, is
brought into terrible evidence; the language of the inner voices is
written out in letters of fire.

      *      *      *

Life never seems so clear and easy as when the heart is beating faster
at the sight of some generous self-risking deed.  We feel no doubt then
what is the highest prize the soul can win; we almost believe in our
own power to attain it.

      *      *      *

It is one thing to love the fruits of treachery, and another thing to
love traitors.

      *      *      *

The same society has had a gibbet for the murderer and a gibbet for the
martyr, an execrating hiss for a dastardly act, and as loud a hiss for
many a word of generous truthfulness or just insight: a mixed condition
of things which is the sign, not of hopeless confusion, but of
struggling order.

      *      *      *

No man, unless by very rare good fortune, could mount high in the world
without incurring a few unpleasant necessities which laid him open to
enmity, and perhaps to a little hissing, when enmity wanted a pretext.

      *      *      *

There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.

      *      *      *

Our relations with our fellow-men are most often determined by
coincident currents of that sort; the inexcusable word or deed seldom
comes until after affection or reverence has been already enfeebled by
the strain of repeated excuses.

      *      *      *

If a man incurs odium by sanctioning a severity that is not thorough
enough to be final, he commits a blunder.

      *      *      *

"The cause of freedom, which is the cause of God's kingdom upon earth,
is often most injured by the enemies who carry within them the power of
certain human virtues.  The wickedest man is often not the most
insurmountable obstacle to the triumph of good."

      *      *      *

"The only safe blows to be inflicted on men and parties are the blows
that are too heavy to be avenged."

      *      *      *

A man's own safety is a god that sometimes makes very grim demands.

      *      *      *

There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief
relation of her life has been no more than a mistake.  She has lost her
crown.  The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered
itself to her, and then for ever passed her by.

      *      *      *

No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom
he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock
can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken.  With the
sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to
believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common
nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of
the soul are dulled.

      *      *      *

To have a mind well oiled with that sort of argument which prevents any
claim from grasping it, seems eminently convenient sometimes; only the
oil becomes objectionable when we find it anointing other minds on
which we want to establish a hold.

      *      *      *

To the common run of mankind it has always seemed a proof of mental
vigour to find moral questions easy, and judge conduct according to
concise alternatives.

      *      *      *

It is the lot of every man who has to speak for the satisfaction of the
crowd, that he must often speak in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping
it will come back to-morrow.

      *      *      *

Our naked feelings make haste to clothe themselves in propositions
which lie at hand among our store of opinions, and to give a true
account of what passes within us something else is necessary besides
sincerity, even when sincerity is unmixed.

      *      *      *

We are so made, almost all of us, that the false seeming which we have
thought of with painful shrinking when beforehand in our solitude it
has urged itself on us as a necessity, will possess our muscles and
move our lips as if nothing but that were easy when once we have come
under the stimulus of expectant eyes and ears.

      *      *      *

Perhaps no man has ever had a mighty influence over his fellows without
having the innate need to dominate, and this need usually becomes the
more imperious in proportion as the complications of life make self
inseparable from a purpose which is not selfish.

      *      *      *

The worst drop of bitterness can never be wrung on to our lips from
without: the lowest depth of resignation is not to be found in
martyrdom; it is only to be found when we have covered our heads in
silence and felt, "I am not worthy to be a martyr: the truth shall
prosper, but not by me."

      *      *      *

Who shall put his finger on the work of justice, and say, "It is
there"?  Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a
fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

      *      *      *

In strictness there is no replacing of relations: the presence of the
new does not nullify the failure and breach of the old.  Life has lost
its perfection: it has been maimed; and until the wounds are quite
scarred, conscience continually casts backward doubting glances.

      *      *      *

The baser part of the multitude delight in degradations, apart from any
hatred; it is the satire they best understand.

      *      *      *

It is but once that we can know our worst sorrows.

      *      *      *

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes,
whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

      *      *      *

The contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission
than in the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our
self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the
purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by
it the hope in lies is for ever swept away, and the soul recovers the
noble attitude of simplicity.

      *      *      *

Strong feeling unsatisfied is never without its superstition, either of
hope or despair.

      *      *      *

In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or
heard perfectly clear messages.  Such truth as came to them was brought
confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs
of unfailing wing and piercing vision--men who believed falsities as
well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right.

      *      *      *

The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who
stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels
had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the
path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause
in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of
inaction and death.

      *      *      *

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we
know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with
inward facts, which constitutes a man's critical actions, it will be
better not to think ourselves wise about his character.

      *      *      *

There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first turn the
honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for
this reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise
of the only practicable right.  The action which before commission has
been seen with that blended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling
which is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the
lens of apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call
beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike.

      *      *      *

The finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words,
such as _light_, _sound_, _stars_, _music_--words really not worth
looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than _chips_ or
_sawdust_: it is only that they happen to be the signs of something
unspeakably great and beautiful.

I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too; and if
you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and
sawdust to you; they will rather be like those little words, _light_
and _music_, stirring the long winding fibres of your memory, and
enriching your present with your most precious past.

      *      *      *

After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence
of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents
unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling.  The great
world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the
struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope.

      *      *      *

"It is good," sing the old Eumenides, in schylus, "that fear should
sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom--good that men
should carry a threatening shadow in their hearts under the full
sunshine; else, how shall they learn to revere the right?"  That
guardianship may become needless; but only when all outward law has
become needless--only when duty and love have united in one stream and
made a common force.

      *      *      *

Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices
instead of obeying a law they believe in.  Let even a polished man of
these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will
be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the
calculable results of that position.

Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that
brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible
benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his
interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet
forthcoming.

      *      *      *

Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will
inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may
turn out not to be of the supposed importance.  Let him betray his
friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity
called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know.

Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a
profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will
infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in
as the mighty creator of success.  The evil principle deprecated in
that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a
crop after its kind.

      *      *      *

Have not men, shut up in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in
marking the moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the
wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in
triangles, has become a mastering purpose?  Do we not while away
moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial
movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is
incipient habit?

That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money
grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very
beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.

      *      *      *

The rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and
benignity.  A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can
be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily
taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always
been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil
has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith.

      *      *      *

The first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us
to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special
as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far-off hour
of happiness.  It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to
tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy and adds the last
keenness to the agony of despair.

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can
never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's
bosom, or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is
wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is
wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone for
ever from our imagination, and we can only _believe_ in the joy of
childhood.

      *      *      *

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes
find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on
their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys
and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported
to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their
history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows
another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their
souls have been nourished.

      *      *      *

Why did his mind fly uneasily to that void, as if it were the sole
reason why life was not thoroughly joyous to him?  I suppose it is the
way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear
perception that life never _can_ be thoroughly joyous: under the vague
dulness of the gray hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and
finds it in the privation of an untried good.

      *      *      *

"Satan was a blunderer, an introducer of _novit_, who made a
stupendous failure.  If he had succeeded, we should all have been
worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattered."

      *      *      *

There might be such a thing as a man's soul being loose from his body,
and going out and in, like a bird out of its nest and back; and that
was how folks got overwise, for they went to school in this shell-less
state to those who could teach them more than their neighbours could
learn with their five senses and the parson.



COLLINS CLEAR-TYPE PRESS.






[End of Gems from George Eliot]
