It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
George EliotI used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.
George EliotBut human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
George Eliot