What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.

The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used...

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a...

I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will...

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great...

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

Might, could, would -they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ”Know thyself’,’ and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the...

Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

But old Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the out-door world, for he meant to light up the home with new brightness, to deepen all the richness of in-door colour, and give...

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

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 great feelings will...

Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Aye, aye, that’s the way wi’ thee: thee allays makes a peck o’ thy own words out o’ a pint o’ the Bible’s

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us

. . . the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

Consequences are unpitying.

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into...

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action of concession on his behalf. That is a...

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

It’s no trifle at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a...

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent...

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Hatred is like fire – it makes even light rubbish deadly

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters

My dear Mrs Casaubon,” said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, “character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased...

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.