Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.
But no story is the same to us after a lapse of time—or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me...That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power again...
At all events, it is certain that if any medicinal man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active...
Apparently the mingled thread in the web of their life was so curiously twisted together that there could be no joy without a sorrow coming close upon it.
And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind her, and to whom she is gratefu...
A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron sai...
Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own characte...
There are always people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them.
It seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner histo...
It is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the u...
It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
He was a likable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to our friends.
Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunati...
Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.Nay, power is relative; you cannot frightThe coming pest with border fortresses,Or catch your carp with subtle argument.All force is twain in one: cau...
When uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience, are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bit...
When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them.
When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.
Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delig...