Wealth & Money Quote by George Eliot

Eliot treats “excellence” less like a gold medal and more like a proof of concept. The line is pitched as encouragement, but it’s also a quiet argument about what makes life livable when religious certainty, social rank, and inherited meaning are cracking. “Excellence encourages one about life generally” is deliberately broad: not excellence in the abstract, but the lived encounter with something done well - a work of art, an act of integrity, a mind at full stretch. It reassures because it’s evidence that human beings can exceed mere appetite and routine.

Then Eliot pivots to the phrase that does the real work: “spiritual wealth.” She’s not talking about church doctrine or private piety. She’s gesturing toward an economy of value that can’t be tallied in property, prestige, or even happiness. Excellence becomes a kind of moral currency, circulating through a world that might otherwise feel impoverished by cynicism or materialism. The subtext is almost defiant: even if you can’t believe in a neatly ordered universe, you can still believe in depth, in craft, in character.

Context matters. Eliot wrote in a Victorian culture obsessed with improvement, but also haunted by the costs of “progress”: alienation, hypocrisy, the pressure to perform respectability. Her twist is to frame excellence not as self-branding but as revelation. It “shows” the world’s richness; it doesn’t manufacture it. The sentence flatters us into responsibility: if excellence is what makes the world feel spiritually solvent, then producing it - or recognizing it - becomes an ethical act, not just an aesthetic preference.