George Eliot Quotes About Passion

• Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

  George Eliot

  Art, War, Passion

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.117, Penguin

• Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

  George Eliot

  Passion, Men, Games

  "Felix Holt, the Radical". Book by George Eliot. Chapter 29, 1866.

• 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

  Children, Niece, Passion

• 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.

  George Eliot

  Jealousy, Passion, Fire

  George Eliot (1994). “Middlemarch”, p.175, Wordsworth Editions

• For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.

  George Eliot

  Sorry, Passion, Self

  'Middlemarch' (1871-2) bk. 3, ch. 29

• A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

  George Eliot

  Lying, Passion, Men

  George Eliot (1859). “Adam Bede”, p.244, London

• It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.

  George Eliot

  Memories, Powerful, Passion

• There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.

  George Eliot

  Passion, Fire, Fuel

  George Eliot (1873). “Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Works of George Eliot”, p.191

• There is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequences of his passions--does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.

  George Eliot

  Passion, Thinking, Mind

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.310, Penguin

• The best fire doesna flare up the soonest.

  George Eliot

  Patience, Passion, Fire

  George Eliot (1873). “Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse: Selected from the Works of George Eliot”, p.67

• All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet.

  George Eliot

  Passion, Outlets

  GEORGE ELIOT (1860). “ADAM BEDE”, p.180

• The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.

  George Eliot

  Anger, Passion, Vibrations

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.287

• Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.

  George Eliot

  Spring, Passion, First Love

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner, and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.184

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

  George Eliot

  Passion, Men, Vanity

  GEORGE ELIOT (1860). “ADAM BEDE”, p.129

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