Life & Wisdom Quote by George Eliot

Eliot lands the line with the calm authority of someone who has watched earnest people confuse motion for movement. Pairing "iteration" with "friction" is a sly demotion: repetition, she implies, isn’t inherently virtuous, it’s just contact. And contact, as anyone who has tried to force a stuck drawer knows, often produces heat - irritation, noise, ego, defensive justification - long before it produces a result. The phrasing is deliberately physical, almost engineering-minded, which gives the warning a practical bite. You can feel the wasted energy.

The subtext cuts deeper: iteration becomes a moral alibi. Keep revisiting, keep revising, keep "working through it", and you get to look industrious without risking the harder leap into change. Eliot, a novelist obsessed with the mechanics of character - how people rationalize, stall, and self-sabotage - is pointing at a psychological trap: repetition can intensify attachment to the old pattern. Friction doesn’t just slow you down; it can polish the same habits until they feel like principles.

Context matters, too. Writing in a Victorian culture that prized diligence and self-improvement, Eliot is pushing back against the era’s faith in sheer effort. Effort without direction becomes its own kind of spectacle: heat as performance. The line still reads like a rebuke to modern productivity theater - the endless meeting, the perpetual rewrite, the iterative "process" that generates urgency and morale-management while the actual work stays stubbornly unadvanced. Eliot’s genius is making the critique feel less like cynicism than like physics: ignore the conditions, and you’ll get warmth, not forward motion.