George Eliot Distance Quotations

... we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes ...

Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.