Remarks by Mathilde Blind | V2Melody Quotations

“I shall not easily forget a walk through the grounds on one of those tender misty February days when there is a stir and quiver of song in every tree.”

Remembering a landscape where mist, trees and birdsong heightened a sense of mystery · Letter to Mrs Wolfsohn, quoted in Richard Garnett's Memoir (1900)

“I gasp and pant for want of the proper element to breathe in.”

Extending the image of poetry as the atmosphere necessary to her existence · Letter to Richard Garnett, 2 July 1869

Art
Poetry

“My only real intense life has been for a long time in writing, and when I cannot swim and float about in the enchanted waters of poetry I am like a fish out of water.”

Describing poetry as the element in which her inner life could truly breathe · Letter to Richard Garnett, 2 July 1869

Art
Poetry

“A rigidity as unnatural as it is dangerous would be the result of too tenacious a clinging to inherited memories.”

Warning against allowing inherited memory to harden into social rigidity · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“This unwavering faithfulness to the traditions of the past may become a curse to the living.”

Warning that loyalty to inherited tradition can burden the present · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“All greatness, in her eyes, is not a privilege, but a debt, which entails on its possessor a more strenuous effort, a completer devotion to the service of average humanity.”

Presenting exceptional ability as an obligation to serve ordinary humanity · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

Hope
Truth

“In fact, the one is a theory of life, the other a disease of the soul.”

Distinguishing a lived philosophy from a state of spiritual collapse · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“Her thoughts, instead of being naturally winged with melody, seem mechanically welded into song.”

Contrasting organic musical inspiration with verse that feels technically constructed · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“From the present she turned to the past, from the native to the foreign, from the domestic to the historical.”

A compact description of an artist deliberately changing imaginative territory · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

Art
Time

“At the same time, it seems, that no progress could well be made in the evolution of society without these departures on the part of individuals from the well-beaten tracks.”

Arguing that departures from convention are necessary to social development · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“How far the individual can ever be justified in following the dictates of his private judgment, in opposition to the laws and prevalent opinions of his time and country, must remain a question.”

Framing the conflict between individual conscience and social convention · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“By his enthusiastic belief in her he gave her the only thing she wanted—a thorough belief in herself.”

Recognising how another person's faith can awaken confidence and creative power · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“Every author usually writes one book, which he might more or less justly entitle 'My Confessions,' into which he pours an intimate part of his life under a thin disguise of fiction.”

Suggesting that one work often contains an author's most intimate disguised self-portrait · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“They are not studies of life, but life interpreted by the poet's vision.”

Distinguishing poetic vision from mere observation of life · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

“But an aphorism, however brilliant, usually contains only one half the truth.”

A warning that even brilliant maxims usually capture only part of reality · Biography, George Eliot (1883)

Truth

“There is no reason why the moral ideals of one generation should not become the stepping-stones toward their realisation in another.”

Expressing faith that moral imagination can become social reality across generations · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“The substance of all poetry has to be extracted mostly from experience.”

Stating experience as the primary substance from which poetry is made · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“It must be confessed that though, as a rule, we know very little of heaven, our experience of hell is pretty considerable.”

A darkly witty reflection on how familiar suffering is to human experience · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“For poets have unfortunately always been more successful in depicting scenes of passion, crime, and agony than in their descriptions of divine love and beatitude.”

Noting the enduring artistic power of suffering, conflict and tragedy · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“Shelley succeeded, perhaps more completely than any other poet, in marrying the most sublime or evanescent appearances of the material universe to human emotion.”

Praising poetry's power to bind natural appearance to human feeling · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“Man himself gains in moral value, when one reflects that with infinite pain and struggle he has slowly risen above the thraldom of physical nature.”

Finding moral dignity in humanity's painful rise beyond physical compulsion · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“For the true conflict consists in man's struggle with the irresponsible forces of Nature, and the victory in his conquest over them.”

Defining human progress as a struggle to understand and master natural forces · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“But surely the existence of evil is more deeply entwined with the roots of life than seems here admitted.”

Insisting that suffering and evil are rooted more deeply in life than idealism may admit · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

“And his own soul, being one of the loveliest as well as loftiest that ever passed across the stage of the world, transmuted the visible Universe to something after its own likeness.”

Suggesting that the artist transforms the visible world through the character of the self · Lecture, Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin's (1886)

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