George Eliot
So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.Collection: Music
If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.Collection: Clothes
Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.Collection: Life
Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.Collection: Integrity
But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.Collection: Love
The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.Collection: Mother
If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.Collection: Clever
The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.Collection: Silly
Yes, Isaac Taylor, who has just published 'The World of Mind,' is the Isaac Taylor, author of the 'Natural History of Enthusiasm.' I dare say by this time there is a want of fatty particles in his brain.Collection: Mind
... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.Collection: Believe
People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.Collection: Writing
What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.Collection: Despair
... as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.Collection: Book
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.Collection: And Love
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.Collection: Perfect
Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.Collection: Nature
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.Collection: Kissing
She hates everything that is not what she longs for.Collection: Hate
A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.Collection: Lying
Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.Collection: Heart
It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's cropsCollection: Time
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 the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.Collection: Time
Kisses honeyed by oblivion.Collection: Kissing
No man can be wise on an empty stomach.Collection: Wise
After all, the true seeing is within.Collection: Middlemarch
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.Collection: Believe
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!Collection: Different
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.Collection: Glasses
It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.Collection: Friends
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.Collection: Art
Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.Collection: Form
The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.Collection: Happiness
The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.Collection: Life
In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.Collection: Failure
I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.Collection: Brain
No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.Collection: Heartbreak
The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.Collection: Blow
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.Collection: Ignorance
Religion, like all things, begins with self, And naught is known, until one knows himself.Collection: Self
Our thoughts are often worse than we are.Collection: Our Thoughts
A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.Collection: Friendship
Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.Collection: Inspirational
This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.Collection: World
It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.Collection: Ignorance
Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.Collection: Life
Blameless people are always the most exasperating.Collection: People
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?Collection: Play
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.Collection: Lying
The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.Collection: Inspirational