"Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty— it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it... There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy."
George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist and essayist of the Victorian era. Her novels, including Middlemarch, are central works of nineteenth-century English literature.