Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
- Source
- Middlemarch
- Date
- 1871–1872
- Local voice
- Fictional character · Dorothea Brooke
Meaning of “What do we live for, if it is…”
A meaningful life is connected with reducing other people’s burdens, making usefulness and care central rather than peripheral.
Where does it come from?
Middlemarch, Book VIII, Chapter LXXII, Project Gutenberg #145. Dorothea asks what people live for if not to make life less difficult for one another while arguing that Lydgate’s friends should investigate the calumny against him and support him. It is fictional character dialogue inside the novel’s moral and social drama, not an empirical definition of life’s purpose.
Why the local voice matters
Dorothea says this at the Manor in Middlemarch while arguing that Lydgate’s friends should help him against calumny.
