“[I]t seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain. We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.” — Middlemarch

“The terror of being judged sharpens the memory …. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history … : it is a still quivering part of himself. … Age made egoism more eager but less enjoying.” — Middlemarch

“Mr. Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation. He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure for the depth of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention.” — Middlemarch

“I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an impatience of everything in which the parson doesn’t cut the principal figure. I see something of that in Mr. Tyke at the Hospital: a good deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people uncomfortably—aware of him. …” “True,” said Dorothea. “… I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest—I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.” — Middlemarch

'Gust of Wind' -- Lévy-Dhurmer

Party is Nature too, and you shall see
By force of Logic how they both agree:
The Many in the One, the One in Many;
All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:
Genus holds species, both are great or small;
One genus highest, one not high at all;
Each species has its differentia too,
This is not That, and He was never You,
Though this and that are AYES, and you and he
Are like as one to one, or three to three.

— Middlemarch, Ch. 51 epigraph

'Silence' -- Lévy-Dhurmer

“Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born. But Mr. Casaubon’s theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch

'Fantasmagorie' by Lévy-Dhurmer

“‘What is your religion?’ said Dorothea. ‘I mean — not what you know about religion, but the belief that helps you most?'” — George Eliot, Middlemarch

Woman With a Gold Medallion (Levy-Dhurmer)

“Public life drives out private life. The more political our society becomes (in the broadest sense of ‘political’ — the obsessions, the compulsions of collectivity) the more individuality seems lost. … [N]ational purpose is now involved with the manufacture of commodities in no way essential to human life, but vital to the political survival of the country. … The whole matter … has to do with invasion of the private sphere (including the sexual) by techniques of exploitation and domination.” — Saul Bellow, Herzog (p. 178)

Saul Bellow

“… irritated feeling with him, as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge.” — Middlemarch

George Eliot

Speculation

Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate;
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy.
Yet with a pleasing sorcery, could charm
Pain for awhile, or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm the obdured breast
With stubborn patience, as with triple steel.

— John Milton, Paradise Lost Book II (557-69)