Life & Wisdom Quote by George Eliot

Eliot lands the blow with a sentence that sounds like moral philosophy smuggled into a bit of insect-cruelty. The phrase "buzzing glory" is doing sly work: it makes the neighbor's life feel vivid, noisy, insistently present - not abstract "success", but a living thing that vibrates in your ear. Envy, Eliot implies, is rarely a grand, operatic hatred. It's irritation. It's the petty reflex to swat what reminds you you're not the one humming.

"Pinch the life out" is intimate and tactile, the violence of fingers, not armies. That choice matters because Eliot's fiction is obsessed with the everyday arenas where people justify themselves: the drawing room, the parish, the family. Harm happens there not through villainy but through plausibly respectable impulses - correcting, gossiping, diminishing, "putting someone in their place". The subtext is that moral accounting is often rigged by proximity: if you don't use a knife, if you don't spill blood, if you can call it "just being honest", you can pretend the damage doesn't count.

The kicker is the legalistic dodge embedded in "think that such killing is no murder". Eliot targets the self-exculpating mind, the way we carve out exceptions so our resentment can feel like virtue. In a Victorian culture fluent in respectability and reputation, this is a critique of social execution: the quiet sabotage of someone's prospects or standing, done with clean hands and a clear conscience. Eliot isn't romanticizing innocence; she's diagnosing how easily ordinary people become lethal while insisting they're merely practical.