“I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice or dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust and dishonest towards them… . I am honest, because I don’t like to inflict evil on others in this life, not because I’m afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact is, I do not love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there may be for that in your mind… . It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery. Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen; and I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come, that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labour for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them.”

—George Eliot, “Worldiness and Other-Wordliness: The Poet Young”