Frasi di George Eliot

pagina 6

“Un’intelligenza perfettamente sana è sempre un po’ spaesata in questo pazzo mondo.”

“I sotterfugi e le piccole bugie, ad un cuore leale, tanta pena quanto ad un artista le pennellate false che solo il suo occhio esperto sa distinguere. Ma diventano leggeri quando tutte le azioni sono state menzognere.”

“Gli animali sono amici così piacevoli: non fanno domande, non criticano.”

“Affidiamo la gente alla misericordia di Dio, ma noi non ne dimostriamo alcuna.”

“Dio è inconcepibile, l'immortalità incredibile, ma il dovere è perentorio e assoluto.”

“Se presti attenzione ai tuoi discorsi, ti accorgerai che sono guidati dai tuoi intenti meno coscienti.”

“In ogni separazione c'è un'immagine della morte.”

“Essere poeta significa possedere un'anima così pronta a comprendere che nessuna sfumatura di qualità le sfugge, e così pronta a sentire, che quella comprensione non è che una mano che suona con varietà finemente ordinata sulle corde del sentimento - un'anima il cui sapere si trasforma istantaneamente in sentimento e il sentimento torna in un baleno ad essere un nuovo organo del sapere.”

“Ci sono personalità in cui, se esse ci amano, siamo consapevoli di avere una sorta di battesimo e di consacrazione: esse ci vincolano alla rettitudine e alla purezza grazie alla loro pura fiducia in noi; e i nostri peccati divengono quel genere peggiore di sacrilegio che abbatte l'invisibile altare della fiducia. “Se tu non sei buono, non lo è nessuno” - queste brevi parole possono conferire un terribile significato alla responsabilità, possono contenere una forza corrosiva per il rimorso.”

“Ma ciò che chiamiamo disperazione è in realtà la dolorosa impazienza della speranza non alimentata.”

“Le nostre passioni non vivono l'una separata dall'altra, in camere serrate a chiave, ma, rivestite del loro modesto guardaroba di idee, portano i loro viveri a un tavolo comune e mangiano assieme, nutrendosi delle provviste comuni a seconda del loro appetito.”

“Se vedessimo e sentissimo in modo intenso tutta la normale vita umana, sarebbe come udire l'erba crescere e il pulsare del cuore dello scoiattolo, e moriremmo per il frastuono che è al di là del silenzio. Così come stanno le cose, i più svegli di noi si muovono ben imbottiti di stupidità.”

“Chiunque osservi con attenzione la convergenza furtiva dei destini umani, scorge una lenta preparazione di effetti che una vita esercita su un'altra, che ha l'effetto di una calcolata ironia sull'indifferenza o sullo sguardo gelido con cui guardiamo il nostro vicino non ancora conosciuto. Il Destino sta in attesa, sarcastico, tenendo i nostri dramatis personae stretti in pugno.”

“Suppongo che una delle ragioni per le quali riusciamo molto raramente a consolare il nostro prossimo, sia quella che il nostro buon volere non sa tradursi in parole. Possiamo mandare doni e aiuti senza dar loro il sapore del nostro egoismo; ma la parola è come un torrente che conserva le tracce del terreno impuro che ha attraversato.”

“Le sofferenze acute e varie che nascono dalla sensibilità che accompagna una elevata cultura, sono forse meno degne di pietà di quella cupa privazione di ogni consolazione intellettuale, che obbliga le menti rozze a trovarsi costantemente a tu per tu con i propri dispiaceri e le proprie pene.”

“Sorridi e fatti degli amici; ostenta un cipiglio e fatti venire le rughe: per che cosa viviamo, se non per rendere questo mondo meno difficile per tutti?”

“Certo che le donne sono sciocche: Dio Onnipotente le ha create per essere uguali agli uomini.”

“L'infanzia non conosce inquietudine; ma, allo stesso tempo, non è placata da alcun ricordo di tristezza, che sia passata e a cui si sia sopravvissuti.”

“È sempre fatale interrompere la musica o la poesia.”

“It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.”

“Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.”

“That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger — not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.”

“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.”

“Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.”

“You told me the truth when you said to me once, "There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for."”

“I began … to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.”

“Already handbills were in circulation; some presenting, in large print, the alternative of justice on the conspirators or ruin to the Republic; others in equally large print urging the observance of the law and the granting of the Appeal. Round these jutting islets of black capitals there were lakes of smaller characters setting forth arguments less necessary to be read: for it was an opinion entertained at that time (in the first flush of triumph at the discovery of printing), that there was no argument more widely convincing than question-begging phrases in large type.”

“Inclination snatches arguments
To make indulgence seem judicious choice.”

“Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world, especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone costumes— that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men. Still, vanity, with a woman’s whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests. How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side—himself in fact a subject— while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better!”

“I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day," said Mr. Irwine. "No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.”

“We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.”

“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?”

“There comes a night when all too late
The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand,
The eager thought behind closed portals stand,
And the last wishes to the mute lips press
Buried ere death in silent helplessness.”

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

“the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families...”

“This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection of himself in the coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer’s mind presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellowmen; and perhaps his experience ought to have warned him how the scene would end. But a full-fed fountain will be generous with its waters even in the rain, when they are worse than useless; and a fine fount of admonition is apt to be equally irrepressible.”

“His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man’s animal care for his own skin: that awe of the Divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling.”

“The natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.”

“In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.”

“That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.”

“She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.”

“He rushed before them to the glittering space,
And, with a strength that was but strong desire,
Cried, "I am Jubal, I!…. I made the lyre!"
The tones amid a lake of silence fell
Broken and strained, as if a feeble bell
Had tuneless pealed the triumph of a land
To listening crowds in expectation spanned.
Sudden came showers of laughter on that lake;
They spread along the train from front to wake
In one great storm of merriment, while he
Shrank doubting whether he could Jubal be…”

“Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world.”

“It was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and 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.”

“One can say everything best over a meal.”

“No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. 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.”

“But veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.”

“We mortals sometimes cut a pitiable figure in our attempts at display. We may be sure of our own merits, yet fatally ignorant of the point of view from which we are regarded by our neighbour. Our fine patterns in tattooing may be far from throwing him into a swoon of admiration, though we turn ourselves all round to show them.”