What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
Author
George Eliot quotes & passages
4 passages by George Eliot, from Middlemarch, Adam Bede and Silas Marner. George Eliot died in 1880, so the words are in the public domain. Every passage is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg text.
About George Eliot
Pen name of the English novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880). Wrote Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Middlemarch.
Read their work on Project Gutenberg
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
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?
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.
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