If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
 
George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans) (1819 - 1880)
from Middlemarch (1862), Chapter 20, p.185. The Modern Library Edition.