Life & Wisdom Quote by George Eliot

Eliot doesn’t flatter “possibility” as a self-help halo; she puts it under a bright lamp and notices the sheen is doing a lot of work. “Hopeful analogies” are the mind’s favorite hustle: we take one encouraging resemblance (this looks like that time it worked out) and smuggle in a whole future. An analogy isn’t evidence, it’s a story-shaped bridge, and Eliot’s point is how easily we cross it when we want to.

Then come the “handsome, dubious eggs,” one of those metaphors that lands because it’s both comic and faintly grim. Eggs promise life, but they’re also fragile, prone to rot, and suspicious when you don’t know where they came from. Calling possibilities “handsome” admits their aesthetic power: they look good in the imagination, polished and symmetrical, like a well-made plan in the abstract. “Dubious” punctures that beauty with the practical questions we’d rather skip: Will it hatch? Is it even fertile? Or is it just something we’re displaying to ourselves like a talisman?

Eliot, the great realist, is diagnosing a psychological reflex common to her 19th-century moment of social mobility and moral upheaval: the rise of new options alongside new self-deceptions. Her novels are crowded with characters who mistake the glamour of an unopened future for a guarantee. The line’s intent isn’t to ban hope; it’s to warn that hope has a counterfeit department, and it’s excellent at packaging.