George Eliot
Subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.Collection: Coarse
So to live is heaven; to make undying music in the world.Collection: Heaven
Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.Collection: Son
The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.Collection: Triumph
You may try — but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Achieve
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.Collection: Past
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.Collection: Inspirational
Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.Collection: Saint
I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.Collection: Mean
Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.Collection: Girl
Surely it is not true blessedness to be free of sorrow while there is sorrow and sin in the world. Sorrow is a part of love and love does not seek to throw it off.Collection: Love
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.Collection: Relationship
The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.Collection: Law
Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.Collection: Mistake
Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.Collection: Stupid
There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Taken
I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.Collection: Levels
Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.Collection: Growth
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.Collection: Wisdom
To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.Collection: Memories
Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.Collection: Memories
It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.Collection: Truth
The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.Collection: Truth
There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.Collection: Men
The sense of an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite.Collection: Spiritual
I've been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it's not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.Collection: Latin
You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only esCollection: Disappointment
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.Collection: Kindness
One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.Collection: Pride
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.Collection: Wise
Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so .Collection: Children
For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .Collection: Friendship
Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.Collection: Life
There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.Collection: Wisdom
A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.Collection: Hope
Time, like money, is measured by our needs.Collection: Time
How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!Collection: Friendship
Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.Collection: Heart
There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.Collection: Salt
Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.Collection: Neutrality
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.Collection: Beauty
It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.Collection: Clever
If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner.Collection: Food
Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life.Collection: Shoes
Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.Collection: Hurt
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.Collection: Ambition
There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.Collection: Weakness