I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.
How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done–how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful?
Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she...
He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.
Hans: [Y]ou can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed of immortality has sprouted within me.Deronda: Only a fungoid growth, I daresay - a crowing disease in the lungs.
Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hated: she liked all disgust to be on her side.
Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.
Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.
By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman's talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and i...
But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose / To know the mind that stirs between the wings / Of bees...
But that Herschel, for example, who broke the barriers of the heavens— did he not once play a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling pianists? Each of those Shining Ones had to w...
But many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular movements which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though they bring about the end that we fix our mind on and desire.
But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors. We judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by, is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we hav...
A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness i...
A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for the...
Though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on---- that's pretty much what I've made out; yet some folks are so wise they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason...
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
Decide on what you think is right and stick to it.