I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.
I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoil...
I daresay some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a violent shock from the consequences of their own actions
I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for...
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 imagination was not easily acted on, but she could not help thinking that her case was a hard one, since it appeared that other people thought it hard.
Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which have no gre...
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.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsio...
Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time...
Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which gre...
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 something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer height...
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.
Before such calm external beauty the presence of a vague fear is more distinctly felt - like a raven flapping its slow wing across the sunny air.
Are you beginning to dislike slang, then? said Rosamond, with mild gravity. Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class. There is correct English: that is not slang. I beg your...
All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.