George Eliot
Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.Collection: Self Confidence
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.Collection: Allowance
You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.Collection: Work
To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.Collection: Opportunity
What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?Collection: Tragedy
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.Collection: Ideas
I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.Collection: Mean
The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.Collection: Firsts
When a workman knows the use of his tools, he can make a door as well as a window.Collection: Doors
How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him. . . .Collection: Men
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.Collection: Future
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.Collection: Common
There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.Collection: Men
Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.Collection: Book
I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.Collection: Life
I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.Collection: Mirrors
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.Collection: Art
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.Collection: Memories
There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.Collection: Infidelity
It is hard to believe long together that anything is "worth while," unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.Collection: Friendship
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.Collection: Love
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.Collection: Nature
"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.Collection: Heaven
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.Collection: Life
The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.Collection: Lawlessness
I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.Collection: Women
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.Collection: Self
Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.Collection: Giving
There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.Collection: Failure
Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.Collection: Justice
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.Collection: Expectations
But what is opportunity to the man who can't use it?Collection: Opportunity
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.Collection: Sweet
The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.Collection: Travel
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.Collection: Stars
The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love--that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another.Collection: Mother
The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.Collection: Lips
If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.Collection: Lying
The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.Collection: Expectations
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.Collection: Rivers
These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.Collection: Jewels
Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.Collection: Men
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.Collection: Cheating
A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictoriesCollection: Mean
I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.Collection: Flower
To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.Collection: Wisdom
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.Collection: Believe
Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.Collection: Discipline
It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.Collection: Love