Adam Bede by George Eliot

These are quotes from today’s reading. The first embodies a fundamental belief of mine, and the second seems to me a wise statement about a helpful way to view life. I hope I can become "at once penetrating and credulous". (The italics in the quote are mine.)

“I hate to be talking where it's no use: I like to keep my breath for doing i'stead o' talking."

“Adam was not a man to be gratuitously superstitious, but he had the blood of the peasant in him as well as of the artisan, and a peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel. Besides, he had that mental combination which is at once humble in the region of mystery and keen in the region of knowledge: it was the depth of his reverence quite as much as his hard common sense which gave him his disinclination to doctrinal religion, and he often checked Seth's argumentative spiritualism by saying, "Eh, it's a big mystery; thee know'st but little about it." And so it happened that Adam was at once penetrating and credulous.”