George Eliot

She decided to use a male name because she thought it would persuade people to respect her books.

Lived with George Henry Lewes for 23 years.

Her first novel "Adam Bede" was published when she was forty years old.

Her novel "Middlemarch" has been described as the greatest English Language novel ever written by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes.

It will never rain roses. When we want to have more roses we must plant,more trees.

Animals are such agreeable friends--they ask no questions, they pass no,criticisms.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not,to make reasons for husbands to stay home, and still stronger reasons,for bachelors to go out.

What makes life dreary is want of motive.

[on connecting] What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?,[on style] Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from,giving in words evidence of the fact.

[on growth] Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth,within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations,of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

[on truth] We carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

[on choice] Choice is the strongest principle of growth.

An egotist is a cock who thinks the sun has risen to hear him crow.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?,The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

What should I do—how should I act now, this very day What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.

If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again.

what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Latinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful,O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude. . .

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

I cannot imagine myself without some opinion, but I wish to have good reasons for them.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it.

Those who trust us educate us.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

I told you from the beginning—as soon as I could—I told you I was afraid of myself. " There was a piteous pleading in the low murmur in which Deronda turned his ear only. Her face afflicted him too much. "I felt a hatred in me that was always working like an evil spirit—contriving things. Everything I could do to free myself came into my mind; and it got worse—all things got worse. That is why I asked you to come to me in town. I thought then I would tell you the worst about myself. I tried. But I could not tell everything.

Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacing are swung--are scarcely perceptible; momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life to another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.

There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that—if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is—I wouldn’t give twopence for him’— here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.

I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.

But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.

Whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.

A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest.

My dear Mrs Casaubon," said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, "character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do. ""Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class. ” “There is correct English: that is not slang. ” “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.

Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid—necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?,Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.

She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.

Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.

If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?,Oh, you dear good father!" cried Mary, putting her hands round her father´s neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. "I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world. ""Nonsense, child; you´ll think your husband better. ""Impossible," said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone, "husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

He was unique to her among men because he’s impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who’s nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.

She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery.

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?,It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.

Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?,After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

She hates everything that is not what she longs for.

mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire.

I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.

Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle.

When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other, to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories,If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

It is just that I don’t know how I could live without the hope of her. It would be like learning to live with wooden legs.

A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite.

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric.

A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

Modesty, not temper.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business – that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.

If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?,For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations.

Her lips trembled, and so did his. It was never known which lips were the first to move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly, and then they moved apart. The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe.

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

Animals are such agreeable friends―they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows--in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain--in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine--it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed by external objects.

My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the out-door world, for he meant to light up the home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of in-door colour, and give a keener edge of delight to the warm fragrance of food: he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred,and make the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless--fell but hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the food had little fragrance, where the human faces had no sunshine in them,but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want. But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learnt the secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time, with unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in his own mighty, slow-beating heart.

She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood.

What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?,Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him—rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion.

Wishes are held to be ominous; according to which belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have an impious objection to a squint, your offspring is more likely to be born with one; also, that if you happen to desire a squint, you would not get it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject, taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds of fulfilment.

Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf.

Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.

In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

. . . but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle — solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!,How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.

He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.

what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an ‘appointment’) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?,Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception.

Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.

The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it oftensubsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.

If I really care for you, if I try to think myself into your position and orientation, then the world is bettered by my effort at understanding and comprehension. If you respond to my effort by trying to extend the same sympathy and understanding to others in turn, then the betterment of the world has been minutely but significantly extended. We want people to feel with us, more than to act for us.

Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.

Animals are such agreeable friends they ask no questions pass no criticisms.

There is no feeling except the extremes of fear and grief that does not find relief in music.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

Decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Blessed is the man who having nothing to say refrains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change the succession of influences that modify the being.

Necessity does the work of courage.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?,No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Better a false belief than no belief at all.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?,Those who trust us educate us.

Hatred is like fire-it makes even light rubbish deadly.

Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!,Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement much disputation and yet more personal liking.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement much disputation and yet more personal liking.

Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

Animals are such agreeable friends- they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action and they will have it if they cannot find it.

Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as they tie their cravats there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love the second something to revere.

What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?,Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again.

What makes life dreary is want of motive.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust.

What makes life dreary is want of motive.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good and we must hunger for them.

Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.

Time like money is measured by our needs.

The years seem to rush by now and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold in the heart.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Excellence encourages one about life generally it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.

A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

There is nothing will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

Might could would-they are contemptible auxiliaries.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Speech may be barren but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.

Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good and we must hunger for them.

Our words have wings but fly not where we would.

I fear that in this thing many rich people deceive themselves. They go on accumulating the means but never using them; making bricks, but never building.

We cannot help the way in which people speak of us . . .

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Excellence encourages one about life generally it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?,Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.