Quote by George Eliot: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”

Most of what makes the world better never makes it into history books. Eliot is saying that quiet kindness, small acts of decency, and private courage — the things nobody records — are actually the substance of human progress, not the grand gestures of famous people.

This closing line of Middlemarch was published in 1872. The novel ends by reflecting on its protagonist Dorothea, whose goodness left no monument — Eliot's way of honoring the invisible moral labor done by ordinary people, especially women, whose lives history did not consider worth recording.

Pen name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the leading novelists of the Victorian era, whose works explored moral complexity and the inner lives of ordinary people. Her masterwork Middlemarch is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels in the English language.