George Eliot
He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose. . . .Collection: Appreciation
The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.Collection: Gout
When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.Collection: Girl
Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.Collection: Horse
The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.Collection: Lying
A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.Collection: Pride
A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.Collection: Mean
Particular lies may speak a general truth.Collection: Lying
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.Collection: Love
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.Collection: Life
History repeats itself.Collection: Wise
Primary (the LDS Church's Sunday school for children) is where you go to do with somebody else's mother the things you would do with your own mother if she weren't so busy teaching Primary.Collection: Mother
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.Collection: Missing
How oft review; each finding, like a friend, Something to blame, and something to commend.Collection: Blame
It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.Collection: Ignorance
There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room.Collection: Wrath
It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.Collection: Trying
Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.Collection: Busybodies
I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.Collection: Ideas
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.Collection: Motherhood
Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.Collection: Long
For character too is a process and an unfoldingamong our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?Collection: Character
You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.Collection: Husband
A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.Collection: Fall
If troubles were put up to market, I'd sooner buy old than new. It's something to have seen the worst.Collection: Trouble
[It is easier] to quell emotion than to incur the consequences of venting it.Collection: Venting
I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.Collection: Book
I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!Collection: Ciphers
Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!Collection: Determined
It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons.Collection: Mother
When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.Collection: Burning
People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.Collection: Lying
Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.Collection: Death
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.Collection: Dog
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.Collection: Inspirational
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.Collection: Death
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.Collection: Religious
We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.Collection: Travel
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.Collection: Children
Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.Collection: Dream
Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.Collection: Memories
It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.Collection: Pockets
I flutter all ways, and fly in none.Collection: Way
Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.Collection: Past
That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.Collection: Struggle
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.Collection: Spring
It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable--when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us--that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.Collection: Struggle
What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.Collection: Cute
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.Collection: Cute