All 26 Uses of
mortal
in
Middlemarch
- They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good-luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.†
Chpt 1
- We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!"†
Chpt 1
- And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.†
Chpt 1 *
- Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness for the author of a "Key to all Mythologies," this trait is not quite alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims some of our pity.†
Chpt 1
- I have devoted myself to this object of hospital-improvement, but I will boldly confess to you, Mr. Lydgate, that I should have no interest in hospitals if I believed that nothing more was concerned therein than the cure of mortal diseases.†
Chpt 2
- "Oh, I track the fairest fair Through new haunts of pleasure; Footprints here and echoes there Guide me to my treasure: "Lo! she turns—immortal youth Wrought to mortal stature, Fresh as starlight's aged truth— Many-named Nature!"†
Chpt 2
- No one in Middle march was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate's past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did not come under their own senses.†
Chpt 2
- It is true she sang "Meet me by moonlight," and "I've been roaming"; for mortals must share the fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always classical.†
Chpt 2
- The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.†
Chpt 2
- Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.†
Chpt 2
- Considering that Fred was not at all coarse, that he rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice.†
Chpt 3
- Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.†
Chpt 3
- Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man.†
Chpt 3
- The uneasiness first stirred by her aunt's questions grew and grew till at the end of ten days that she had not seen Lydgate, it grew into terror at the blank that might possibly come—into foreboding of that ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply wipes out the hopes of mortals.†
Chpt 3
- O endless vocatives that would still leave expression slipping helpless from the measurement of mortal folly!†
Chpt 4
- I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness of the beloved object.†
Chpt 4
- As to the facility with which mortals escape knowledge, try an average acquaintance in the intellectual blaze of London, and consider what that eligible person for a dinner-party would have been if he had learned scant skill in "summing" from the parish-clerk of Tipton, and read a chapter in the Bible with immense difficulty, because such names as Isaiah or Apollos remained unmanageable after twice spelling.†
Chpt 4
- But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate's introduction he was helped by what we mortals rashly call good fortune.†
Chpt 5
- I only said that no mortal ever made love to me besides you.†
Chpt 6
- It might have been supposed that Rosamond had travelled too, since she had found the pointless conversation of Mr. Ned Plymdale perfectly wearisome; but to most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable—else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?†
Chpt 6
- They fell like a mortal chill on Lydgate's roused tenderness.†
Chpt 6
- So strangely determined are we mortals, that, after having been long gratified with the sense that he had privately done the Vicar a service, the suggestion that the Vicar discerned his need of a service in return made him shrink into unconquerable reticence.†
Chpt 7
- On the offer of the food ordered by Lydgate, which he refused, and the denial of other things which he demanded, he seemed to concentrate all his terror on Bulstrode, imploringly deprecating his anger, his revenge on him by starvation, and declaring with strong oaths that he had never told any mortal a word against him.†
Chpt 7
- …been fatal to him—true that if he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with all his debts unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode, and taken beggary rather than the rescue which had been sullied with the suspicion of a bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest among the sons of men)—nevertheless, he would not turn away from this crushed fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful effort to get acquittal for himself by howling against another.†
Chpt 8
- Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.†
Chpt 8
- She evidently thinks nothing of her own future, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her.†
Chpt 8
Definition:
-
(mortal as in: mortal body) human (especially merely human); or subject to death