George Eliot
A good solid bit of work lasts.Collection: Work
There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots.Collection: Boots
We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger.Collection: Fear
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.Collection: Passion
The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.Collection: Hero
Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.Collection: Pain
Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?Collection: Witty
Where you have friends you should not go to inns.Collection: Inns
Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish, And serve the ends of wisdom.Collection: Prayer
Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken.Collection: Light
What if my words Were meant for deeds.Collection: What If
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.Collection: Prayer
There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.Collection: Drama
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.Collection: Inspirational
If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified: by adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.Collection: Views
So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.Collection: Pain
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.Collection: Thinking
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?Collection: Christian
It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Change
Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.Collection: Beauty
Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!Collection: Best Friend
Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.Collection: Life
Children demand that their heroes should be freckle less, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.Collection: Children
It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.Collection: Fear
I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Patience
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.Collection: Running
It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.Collection: Caring
May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.Collection: Love
But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.Collection: Love
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.Collection: Lying
Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.Collection: Men
For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.Collection: Moving
I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate.Collection: Knack
It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found - in loving obedience.Collection: Work
Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.Collection: Mother
It's them as take advantage that get advantage I' this world, I think: folks have to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em.Collection: Opportunity
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!Collection: Beautiful
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.Collection: Beautiful
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.Collection: Beautiful
He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself.Collection: People
The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.Collection: Imagination
Teach love, for that is what you are.Collection: Inspirational
When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.Collection: Children
We are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us.Collection: Wrongdoing
Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.Collection: Wise