George Eliot
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.Collection: Grief
People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.Collection: Thinking
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.Collection: Memories
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.Collection: Peace
There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.Collection: Reading
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.Collection: Mistake
In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.Collection: Men
even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.Collection: Sympathy
Opinions: men's thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments.Collection: Men
A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.Collection: Thinking
The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.Collection: Stranger
I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.Collection: Mind
trouble always seems heavier when it is only one's thought and not one's bodily activity that is employed about it.Collection: Worry
My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.Collection: Book
All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!Collection: Writing
There's many a good bit o' work done with a sad heart.Collection: Heart
The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth, are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.Collection: Spiritual
... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.Collection: Past
I will to make life less bitter for a few within my reach.Collection: Bitter
If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wineglass to the light and look judicial.Collection: Light
Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.Collection: People
... learning to love any one is like an increase of property, -- it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.Collection: Care
What is better than to love and live with the loved? -- But that must sometimes bring us to live with the dead; and this too turns at last into a very tranquil and sweet tie, safe from change and injury.Collection: Sweet
I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.Collection: Thinking
But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.Collection: Lasts
Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right.Collection: Integrity
To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.Collection: Rivers
I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.Collection: Nice
I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see meCollection: People
It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.Collection: Men
There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,--that does not make a man sing or play the better.Collection: Music
Nature repairs her ravages,--repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.Collection: Nature
Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.Collection: Night
Lord! Thou art with Thy people still; they see Thee in the night-watches, and their hearts burn within them as Thou talkest with them by the way. And Thou art near to those that have not known Thee; open their eyes that they may see Thee--see Thee weeping over them, and saying, "Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life"--see Thee hanging on the cross and saying, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"--see Thee as Thou wilt come again in Thy glory to judge them at the last. Amen.Collection: Art
Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?Collection: Punishment
Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.Collection: People
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.Collection: Believe
What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!Collection: Produce
I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.Collection: Trust
The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,--whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,--which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.Collection: Water
To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline.Collection: Women
We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.Collection: Spring
the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.Collection: Church
the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims ... to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.Collection: Spring
It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.Collection: Men
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.Collection: Disappointment
It's no trifle at her time at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.Collection: Doctors