All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say the earth bears n...
That living bodies, fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally; but must be regarded as consisting of...
Still—it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.
Religious feeling; but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is ab...
Many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to ‘find their feet’ among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is d...
What could two men, so different from each other, see in this brown patch, as Mary called hereself? It was certainly not her plainness that attracted them (and let all plain young ladies be warned aga...
We are poorplants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, ifwe get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence! Thevery capacity for good would go out of us. For,...
To have taken Maggie by the hand and said, I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips should not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt...
There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that rema...
The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm....
The cubic feet of oxygen yearly swallowed by a full-grown man – what a shudder they might have created in some Middlemarch circles! ‘Oxygen! nobody knows what that may be – is it any wonder the choler...
That's the way with 'em all: it's as if they thought the world 'ud be new-made because they're to be married.
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 divine power against evil- widening the skirts of light and making the str...
Solomon’s Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.
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 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...
Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence;...
Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization—inhabited by meagre sheep and...
People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes;