George Eliot Quote

We are poorplants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, ifwe get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence! Thevery capacity for good would go out of us. For, tell the most impassionedorator, suddenly, that his wig is awry, or his shirt-lap hanging out, andthat he is tickling people by the oddity of his person, instead ofthrilling them by the energy of his periods, and you would infallibly dryup the spring of his eloquence. That is a deep and wide saying, that nomiracle can be wrought without faith--without the worker's faith inhimself, as well as the recipient's faith in him. And the greater part ofthe worker's faith in himself is made up of the faith that others believein him.m

George Eliot

We are poorplants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, ifwe get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence! Thevery capacity for good would go out of us. For, tell the most impassionedorator, suddenly, that his wig is awry, or his shirt-lap hanging out, andthat he is tickling people by the oddity of his person, instead ofthrilling them by the energy of his periods, and you would infallibly dryup the spring of his eloquence. That is a deep and wide saying, that nomiracle can be wrought without faith--without the worker's faith inhimself, as well as the recipient's faith in him. And the greater part ofthe worker's faith in himself is made up of the faith that others believein him.m

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About George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
Scandalously and unconventionally for the era, she lived with the married George Henry Lewes as his conjugal partner, from 1854–1878, and called him her husband. He remained married to his wife and supported their children, even after she left him to live with another man and have children with him. In May 1880, eighteen months after Lewes's death, George Eliot married her long-time friend, John Cross, a man much younger than she, and she changed her name to Mary Ann Cross.