She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that so...
She seated herself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her, looking in her plain dress of some thin woollen-white material, without a single ornament on her besides her wedding-ring, as if s...
She looked at Will with a direct glance, full of delighted confidence.You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here again till I have made myself of some mark in the world? said...
Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.
Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness th...
O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being the freshest modern instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, w...
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.
Mrs. Tulliver was what is called a good-tempered person,–never cried, when she was a baby, on any slighter ground than hunger and pins; and from the cradle upward had been healthy, fair, plump, and du...
Mr. Casaubon had no second attack of equal severity with the first, and in a few days began to recover his usual condition. But Lydgate seemed to think the case worth a great deal of attention. He not...
Miss Lucy's called the bell o' St. Ogg's, they say: that's a cur'ous word,' observed Mr. Pullet, on whom the mysteries of etymology sometimes fell with an oppressive weight.
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives is a still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among thorns and thi...
Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, m...
Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual...
Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her...
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desiresThat trample on the dead to seize their spoil,Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistibleAs exhalations laden with slow...
Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within
Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which made her pose remarkable. She did not really see t...
I’m very fond of you, Maggie; I shall never forget you, said Philip, and when I’m very unhappy, I shall always think of you, and wish I had a sister with dark eyes, just like yours.
It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.