The ‘History of the Devil,’ by Daniel Defoe,–not quite the right book for a little girl, said Mr. Riley. How came it among your books, Mr. Tulliver?
The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too; but it is of that unwept, hidden sort that goes on from gen...
The limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared unea...
The Squire’s life was quite as idle as his sons’, but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom w...
That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger - not to be interfered with by speech or action which would di...
That is beautiful mysticism, it is a—Please not to call it by any name, said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. You will say it is Persian, or something geographical. It is my life. I have...
Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence...
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous...
So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to drea...
Snuff, the brown spaniel, who had placed herself in front of him, and had been watching him for some time, now jumped up in impatience for the expected caress. But Godfrey thrust her away without look...
She felt that she enjoyed it [horseback riding] in a pagan, sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in dang...
Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!
Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass and rags.
Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.
Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
No, said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with his usually careless and unemphatic speech—there's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have sli...
My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.