Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant’s club on your neatly carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over the present quickening in the general pace of things…
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
…but concealment had been the habit of his life, and the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of a deeper humiliation.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
…certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people’s pretensions much more readily. To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
“Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”— George pseudonym of MaryAnn Evans Eliot ^2 Middlemarch, bk.1, ch.1.
Somewhere nearby, a neighbor’s playing a gramophone. I’ve never heard it before. I didn’t know it existed. Always a first time. There’s a dog in the house in back. Maybe two dogs. But someone has a gramophone. Just one. Between the trumpet blasting and the dogs in back obeying their master’s voice is my house, my head, me. Being nearby and distant is what defines a neighbor.
— Miguel Ángel Asturias, Mr. President (trans. David Unger)
As is typical in the emotional life of the common people, these peasants—who were more ignorant than they were malicious—got irritated, then excited, then intoxicated by the sound of their own voices, and then more excited still, the more they lavished insults and threats on their victim. This is how, through growing excitement, the masses sometimes unwittingly end up committing the most unjust and brutal actions.
— Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (trans. Carolyn Betensky and Jonathan Loesberg)
Nothing is better for one’s physical health than cold egotism; everything keeps better on ice.
— Eugène Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (trans. Carolyn Betensky and Jonathan Loesberg)