George Eliot
Life is like our game at whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.Collection: Life
There's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.Collection: Common Sense
We cannot reform our forefathers.Collection: Reform
There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.Collection: Luck
I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.Collection: Writing
I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.Collection: Principles
A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.Collection: Children
That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.Collection: Blessed
When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business - that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.Collection: Drama
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.Collection: People
Knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.Collection: Love Is
Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.Collection: Summer
A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.Collection: Atheism
...Though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on---- that's pretty much what I've made out; yet some folks are so wise they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see't.Collection: Wise
It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.Collection: World
As they who make Good luck a god count all unlucky men.Collection: Good Luck
Doesn't this quote just call up feelings of comfort and home? Comparing friendship to the nest a bird lives in and builds with loving determination reminds me that having a solid relationship takes work and dedication. And yet, when you succeed in crafting a friendship, you can rest in the comfort it provides.Collection: Best Friend
Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.Collection: Darkness
Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone that by unexpected words.Collection: Tone
Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.Collection: Eggs
There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer.Collection: Men
The devil tempts us not--'tis we tempt him, Reckoning his skill with opportunity.Collection: Opportunity
But certain winds will make men's temper bad.Collection: Men
I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.Collection: Fighting
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.Collection: Love
Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.Collection: Love
Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.Collection: Love
We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.Collection: Love
Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed-- Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought-- Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer.Collection: Love
Things don't happen because they're bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.Collection: Eggs
The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.Collection: Lying
There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.Collection: Morning
In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.Collection: Mother
Though I am not endowed with an ear to seize those earthly harmonies, which to some devout souls have seemed, as it were, the broken echoes of the heavenly choir--I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts.Collection: Music
It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.Collection: Men
Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.Collection: Love
We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.Collection: Grief
Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.Collection: Character
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. MiddlemarchCollection: Dream
My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.Collection: Sky
There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.Collection: Sorrow
Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.Collection: Life
"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.Collection: Home
Effective magic is transcendent nature.Collection: Magic
College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t'hold the stuff as is poured into 'em.Collection: Education
You are discontented with the world because you can't get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it's a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.Collection: Men
Correct English is the slang of prigs.Collection: Language
The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.Collection: Sorrow
Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.Collection: Men