George Eliot Mistake Quotations

Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means --one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

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 forever passed her by.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we're so fond of it.