Life & Wisdom Quote by George Eliot

Jealousy usually gets staged as a bonfire emotion: hot, dramatic, at least briefly alive. Eliot flips the temperature. This is the kind that "needs very little fire" because it isnt powered by desire so much as by rot. Calling it "hardly a passion" is a quiet insult: passion, however destructive, implies vitality and risk. Eliot is after a meaner variety, one that doesnt even have the dignity of intensity. It just spreads.

The image-making does the moral work. "Blight" drags jealousy out of the theater of romance and into the field: a crop disease, impersonal and contagious, less like a crime than a condition. Then she gives it weather. "Cloudy, damp despondency" suggests an inner climate where nothing dries out, where resentments can mold in peace. That dampness matters: jealousy here isnt sparked by a singular betrayal but sustained by low-grade gloom, the kind that makes every interaction feel like evidence.

The real target is "uneasy egoism". Eliot is always suspicious of the self that cant stop monitoring its own status, the mind that treats other peoples happiness as an audit of its own worth. The subtext is social as much as psychological: in tightly observed communities (Eliots specialty), small comparisons and petty humiliations create perfect conditions for this blight. You dont need a rival; you need an ego that can never quite rest.

Its a forensic sentence: not excusing jealousy, but explaining its ecology so precisely you can see why it thrives in ordinary lives.