"In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations"
About this Quote
Practical competence can be its own trap: once you start succeeding, you’re tempted to treat yesterday’s hard-won lessons as permanent laws. Eliot’s line skewers that quiet slide from lived intelligence into ready-made wisdom. “Petrified” is the key choice - experience is supposed to be organic, responsive, and revisable, but here it becomes mineral: hard, inert, displayable. Maxims and quotations aren’t just sayings; they’re social currency, portable proof that you’ve “seen things.” Eliot hints at the way people use them to launder uncertainty into certainty.
The subtext is moral and psychological. This is not an attack on learning, but on the moment learning stops moving. The person in question remains “practically” able - he can get things done - yet part of his mind has fossilized. Eliot spots a type: the capable man whose judgments arrive pre-packaged, who meets new problems with old sentences, who substitutes the authority of aphorism for the risk of thinking.
Context matters because Eliot writes in a culture newly addicted to self-improvement literature, moral slogans, and the Victorian habit of extracting “lessons” from life and art. Her realism resists that flattening. Novels, for Eliot, are machines for re-complicating human motives; maxims do the opposite. They make messy experience sound orderly, and they let the speaker sound wise without staying vulnerable to the evidence of the present. That’s why the line lands with such dry force: it’s a diagnosis of how wisdom can curdle into performance.
The subtext is moral and psychological. This is not an attack on learning, but on the moment learning stops moving. The person in question remains “practically” able - he can get things done - yet part of his mind has fossilized. Eliot spots a type: the capable man whose judgments arrive pre-packaged, who meets new problems with old sentences, who substitutes the authority of aphorism for the risk of thinking.
Context matters because Eliot writes in a culture newly addicted to self-improvement literature, moral slogans, and the Victorian habit of extracting “lessons” from life and art. Her realism resists that flattening. Novels, for Eliot, are machines for re-complicating human motives; maxims do the opposite. They make messy experience sound orderly, and they let the speaker sound wise without staying vulnerable to the evidence of the present. That’s why the line lands with such dry force: it’s a diagnosis of how wisdom can curdle into performance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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