George Eliot
When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.Collection: Pain
Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?Collection: Atheism
When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.Collection: Strong
Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.Collection: Religious
He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.Collection: Leadership
I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.Collection: Thinking
Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.Collection: Dream
Love supreme defies all sophistry.Collection: Love
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.Collection: Motherhood
A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.Collection: Heart
Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.Collection: Music
There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.Collection: Baptism
When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.Collection: Book
Brothers are so unpleasant.Collection: Brother
When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.Collection: Thinking
... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.Collection: Perfect
In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.Collection: Destiny
Men and women are but children of a larger growth.Collection: Children
Loquacity with tongue or pen is its own reward -- or, punishment.Collection: Punishment
Dear Friends all, A thousand Christmas pleasures and blessings to you -- good resolutions and bright hopes for the New Year! Amen. People who can't be witty exert themselves to be pious or affectionate.Collection: New Year
... one's own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can't help groaning under the weight now and then.Collection: Faults
Don’t judge a book by its cover.Collection: Judging
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
God, immortality, duty – how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.Collection: Firsts
It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.Collection: Strong
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: Reading
I’d sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It’s better to know one’s robbed than to think one’s going to be murdered.Collection: Real
When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.Collection: Strong