George Eliot

“The great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”

“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.”

“A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.”

“If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.”

“I protest against any absolute conclusion.”

“Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“Each position has its corresponding duties.”

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

“It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.”

“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”

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

“there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.”

“We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our little hurts will be made much of - to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.”

“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

“But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me." "What is that?" said Will, rather jealous of the belief."That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and can not do what we would, we are part of the divine struggle against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

“Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.”

“And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women.Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Middlemarch”

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”

“Throughout their friendship Deronda had been used to Hans' egotism, but he had never before felt intolerant of it: when Hans, habitually pouring out his own feelings and affairs, had never cared for any detail in return, and, if he chanced to know any, had soon forgotten it”

“Just a month from this day, on the twentieth of September, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o' clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope.”

“Her heart went out to him with a stronger movement than ever, at the thought that people would blame him. Maggie hated blame; she had been blamed her whole life, and nothing had come of it but evil tempers.”

“I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.”

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

“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.”

“A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.”

“He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.”

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

“Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?”

“She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.”

“We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.”

“If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.”

“One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.”

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”

“Men, like planets, have both a visible and invisible history.”

“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.”

“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.”

“I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it."I call that the fanaticism of sympathy," said Will, impetuously. "You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement. If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others. The best piety is to enjoy--when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight--in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralising over misery? I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom.”

“When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations....The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the most of. The long-recognized blood-relations and connexions by marriage made already a goodly number, which, multiplied by possibilities, presented a fine range for jealous conjecture and pathetic hopefulness.”

“....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.”

“And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory, that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid. ”

“what is opportunity to a man who can't use it.”

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

“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.”

“his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that is should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers threadlike in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. ”