George Eliot
Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.Collection: Ignorance
In high vengeance there is noble scorn.Collection: Noble
The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.Collection: Hate
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.Collection: Time
there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is, to tell them what they're used to.Collection: Two
Even success needs its consolations.Collection: Needs
Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.Collection: Life
What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?Collection: Men
What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.Collection: Fate
There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.Collection: Men
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.Collection: Eggs
There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.Collection: Pride
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.Collection: Sports
It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don't give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.Collection: Kindness
It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.Collection: Heart
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.Collection: Spring
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 to share those good things; but I should better to share in your trouble and your labour.Collection: Thinking
If a woman's young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed.Collection: Thinking
In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.Collection: Children
Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.Collection: Stories
What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?Collection: Sweet
Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.Collection: Women
There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.Collection: Memories
What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman's face? And is there any harmony of tints that has such stirring of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?Collection: Sweet
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.Collection: Ideas
How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.Collection: Rivers
All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!Collection: Morning
Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and would cut them in two.Collection: Cutting
There is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequences of his passions--does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.Collection: Passion
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.Collection: Past
A foreman, if he's got a conscience, and delights in his work, will do his business as well as if he was a partner. I wouldn't give a penny for a man as 'ud drive a nail in slack because he didn't get extra pay for it.Collection: Work
Are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life--a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?Collection: Work
An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.Collection: Wise
O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!Collection: Light
God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.Collection: Atheism
Anger seek it prey,-- Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, Like not to go off hungry, leaving Love To feast on milk and honeycomb at will.Collection: Anger
A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.Collection: Pain
Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.Collection: Beauty
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.Collection: Memories
Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far, The voice divine of human loyalty.Collection: Loyalty
You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.Collection: Life
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.Collection: Life
There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then forever passed her by.Collection: Mistake
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?Collection: Believe
To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is the sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue.Collection: Revenge
It seems to me as a woman's face doesna want flowers; it's almost like a flower itself.... It's like when a man's singing a good tune, you don't want t' hear bells tinkling and interfering wi' the sound.Collection: Women
A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts.Collection: Women
It's a strange thing to think of a man as can lift a chair with his teeth, and walk fifty mile on end, trembling and turning hot and cold at only a look from one woman out of all the rest i' the world. It's a mystery we can give no account of.Collection: Women
I can't abide to see men throw away their tools i' that way, the minute the clock begins to strike, as if they took no pleasure i' their work, and was afraid o' doing a stroke too much.... I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he was shot, before the clock's fairly struck, just as if he'd never a bit o' pride and delight in's work. The very grindstone 'ull go on turning a bit after you loose it.Collection: Work