George Eliot
For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.Collection: Pain
Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.Collection: Vision
Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.Collection: Memories
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.Collection: Silence
When what is good comes of age, and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.Collection: Age
Where Jack isn't safe, Tom's in danger.Collection: Safe
That is the bitterest of all,--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.Collection: Punishment
It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.Collection: Weather
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.Collection: Music
Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.Collection: Art
It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.Collection: Home
Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?Collection: Animal
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.Collection: People
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.Collection: Blood
It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.Collection: Littles
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.Collection: Time
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.Collection: Hands
You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.Collection: Strong
Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.Collection: Witty
Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.Collection: Blow
What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.Collection: Spiritual
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.Collection: Winning
Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.Collection: Love
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.Collection: Oddities
It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.Collection: Tired
One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.Collection: New Beginnings
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.Collection: Hurt
It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.Collection: Forgiveness
It's never too late to be who you were meant to be.Collection: Successful
We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.Collection: People
Appearances have very little to do with happiness.Collection: Littles
Those who trust us educate us.Collection: Education
I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.Collection: Thinking
One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.Collection: Happiness
It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.Collection: Patience
I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.Collection: Men
My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.Collection: Compassion
Man cannot choose his duties.Collection: Men
Souls live on in perpetual echoes.Collection: Echoes
Trouble's made us kin.Collection: Trouble
A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.Collection: Sides
Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.Collection: Real
to my thinking, it is more pitiable to bore than to be bored.Collection: Thinking
To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.Collection: Inspirational
If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.Collection: Art
but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.Collection: Men
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.Collection: Limits
Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.Collection: Nature
News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.Collection: Ideas