George Eliot (quotes) - Wisdom Trove

Troubles made us kin.
History repeats itself.
Joy is the best of wine.
Consequences are unpitying.
Brothers are so unpleasant.
Kisses honeyed by oblivion.
Man cannot choose his duties.
Those who trust us educate us.
A good horse makes short miles.
Don’t judge a book by its cover
Breed is stronger than pasture.
A good solid bit of work lasts.
We cannot reform our forefathers.
Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.
Souls live on in perpetual echoes.
Go forward with joyful confidence.
When you see fair hair Be pitiful.
Love supreme defies all sophistry.
Steady work turns genius to a loom.
Animals are such agreeable friends.
I flutter all ways, and fly in none.
Even success needs its consolations.
After all, the true seeing is within.
Teach love, for that is what you are.
Correct English is the slang of prigs.
The bow always strung … will not do.
Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.
Hear Everything and judge for yourself
What if my words Were meant for deeds.
As leopard feels at home with leopard.
No man can be wise on an empty stomach.
Where Jack isn’t safe, Tom’s in danger.
Effective magic is transcendent nature.
In high vengeance there is noble scorn.
One can say everything best over a meal.
Human experience is usually paradoxical.
It must be sad to outlive aught we love.
Our thoughts are often worse than we are.
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
Particular lies may speak a general truth.
The best fire doesna flare up the soonest.
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.
I protest against any absolute conclusion.
I shall do everything it becomes me to do.
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.
Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right.
Education is an asset no man can take away.
Time, like money, is measured by our needs.
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.
The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.
In every parting there is an image of death.
All our ignorance brings us closer to death.
Better a false belief than no belief at all.
Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.
I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
Things are achieved when they are well begun.
But certain winds will make men’s temper bad.
Our growing thought Makes growing revelation.
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!
It is never too late to be who you want to be.
Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!
Them as ha’ never had a cushion don’t miss it.
Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.
Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.
What is opportunity to the man who cant use it?
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
“Abroad,” that large home of ruined reputations.
Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.
I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!
Genius … is necessarily intolerant of fetters.
Our consciences are not all of the same pattern.
Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
Where you have friends you should not go to inns.
Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.
I love not to be choked with other men’s thoughts.
Appearances have very little to do with happiness.
Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.
Men and women are but children of a larger growth.
Blameless people are always the most exasperating.
Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.
It’s never too late to be who you were meant to be.
The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.
All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet.
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.
But what is opportunity to the man who can’t use it?
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.
It’s a father’s duty to give his sons a fine chance.
Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life.
The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.
She hates everything that is not what she longs for.
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.
A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes.
It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.
A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.
It’s well known there’s always two sides, if no more.
The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.
He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.
Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.
The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.
Don’t you meddle with me, and I won’t meddle with you.
There’s many a good bit o’ work done with a sad heart.
A woman’s lot is made for her by the love she accepts.
A maggot must be born i’ the rotten cheese to like it.
A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.
We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.
It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
As they who make Good luck a god count all unlucky men.
One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.
Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning.
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates a nation.
Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.
Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.
I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate.
Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.
The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.
So to live is heaven; to make undying music in the world.
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.
It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.
Net the large fish and you are sure to have the small fry.
I will to make life less bitter for a few within my reach.
Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.
Hurt, he’ll never be hurt–he’s made to hurt other people.
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
Whatever be thy fate today, Remember, this will pass away!
Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken.
A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.
To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.
The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.
All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.
bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.
Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
Of all forms of human error, prophesy is the most avoidable.
Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.
It’s easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.
Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry’s got a finger in it.
A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.
to my thinking, it is more pitiable to bore than to be bored.
Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.
I not only want to be loved, I want to be told that I’m loved.
But is it what we love, or how we love, That makes true good?
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.
It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crops
Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.
I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.
It’s all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.
I think I dislike what I don’t like more than I like what I like.
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
Your trouble’s easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.
It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
Loquacity with tongue or pen is its own reward — or, punishment.
Subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.
A woman’s hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.
The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.
Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.
Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.
There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.
In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant.
If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.
It is better – it shall be better with me because I have known you.
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Oh, child, men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.
It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent.
Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!
The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion.
People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.
There’s folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t’ hide it.
Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another
Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.
Your dunce who can’t do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.
Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.
But faithfulness can feed on suffering, And knows no disappointment.
A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.
It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
That is the bitterest of all,–to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.
To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.
No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.
Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
Friendships begin with liking or gratitude- roots that can be pulled up.
… one always believes one’s own town to be more stupid than any other.
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
Sweet Truth is a queen proud and mighty– Her throne is in heaven above.
Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools’ pleasure
Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.
Music sweeps by me as a messenger – Carrying a message that is not for me
Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.
It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.
I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.
Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.
I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.
We are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us.
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.
Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far, The voice divine of human loyalty.
Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.
Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.
And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.
[It is easier] to quell emotion than to incur the consequences of venting it.
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.
The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.
Grant folly’s prayers that hinder folly’s wish, And serve the ends of wisdom.
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.
But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope?
I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!
A man’s a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.
One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.
It’s no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.
In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?
A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.
Scepticismcan never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill.
One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.
We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger.
… it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.
Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
There’s folks ‘ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i’ their boots.
The devil tempts us not–’tis we tempt him, Reckoning his skill with opportunity.
Nature repairs her ravages,–repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.
Don’t seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you’ll set other people watching.
There’s folks ‘ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.
When a workman knows the use of his tools, he can make a door as well as a window.
We mustn’t be in a hurry to fix and choose our own lot; we must wait to be guided.
What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?
The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.
Knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.
A woman’s rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born.
Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so .
Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.
Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone that by unexpected words.
It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.
Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.
I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me
but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.
Her own misery filled her heart‚Äîthere was no room in it for other people’s sorrow.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.
Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
We get a deal o’ useless things about us, only because we’ve got the money to spend.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
When what is good comes of age, and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.
There’s good chances and bad chances, and nobody’s luck is pulled only by one string.
… the fallibility of human brains is in nothing more obvious than in proof reading.
I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God.
I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.
It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.
Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.
Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.
If you could make a pudding wi’ thinking o’ the batter, it ‘ud be easy getting dinner.
To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.
Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
I’m not one of those that can see the cat in the dairy and wonder what she’s there for.
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.
‘Character,” says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms – character is destiny’.
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
Old men’s eyes are like old men’s memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.
For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.
… the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.
Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.
There’s no disappointment in memory, and one’s exaggerations are always on the good side.
To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner’s dock is disgrace.
Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
How oft review; each finding, like a friend, Something to blame, and something to commend.
There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room.
The fact is, both callers and work thicken – the former sadly interfering with the latter.
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.
The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.
Religion, like all things, begins with self, And naught is known, until one knows himself.
Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?
The best travel is that which one can take by one’s own fireside. In memory or imagination.
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
The higher life begins for us … when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law.
You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.
You are a good young man,” she said. “But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.
It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.
The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
I don’t see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.
We have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves we should not judge each other harshly.
… when one’s outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.
Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.
Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son’s education, than leave it him in your will.
You know I have duties‚îÄ‚îÄwe both have duties‚îÄ‚îÄbefore which feeling must be sacrificed.
Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
There are new eras in one’s life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.
Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on.
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
… it is seldom a medical man has true religious views–there is too much pride of intellect.
That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.
Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
That sort of reputation which precedes performance [is] often the larger part of a man’s fame.
That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.
The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.
When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.
Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.
It’s no trifle at her time at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.
Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
A blush is no language; only a dubious flag – signal which may mean either of two contradictories
The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.
Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves
The nature o’ things doesn’t change, though it seems as if one’s own life was nothing but change.
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
Selfish‚Äî a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
Education was almost entirely a matter of luck ‚Äî usually of ill-luck ‚Äî in those distant days.
You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.
The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
I cherish my childish loves–the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.
What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?
It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.
I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.
Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?
A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.
Love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.
Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?
Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?
One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.
in certain crises direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy.
If troubles were put up to market, I’d sooner buy old than new. It’s something to have seen the worst.
In the ages since Adam’s marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.
All the learnin’ my father ever paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and the alphabet at th ‘ other.
One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
We judge other according to results; how else?–not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.
Justice is like the kingdom of God–it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.
the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.
It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.
Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.
Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.
I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.
The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.
People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.
It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent – like a carrier pigeon.
An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.
Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.
There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.
College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t’hold the stuff as is poured into ’em.
Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.
Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
… happy husbands and wives can hear each other say the same thing over and over again without being tired.
If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.
It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.
They say fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman, and gives to those who merit.
Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead.
I shall never love anybody. I can’t love people. I hate them.’ ‘The time will come, dear, the time will come.
Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.
Thought Has joys apart, even in blackest woe, And seizing some fine thread of verity Knows momentary godhead.
I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape.
The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts‚Äînot to hurt others.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.
Say “I love you” to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.
The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.
If a woman’s young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed.
There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer.
Folks as have no mind to be o’ use have allays the luck to be out o’ the road when there’s anything to be done.
I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.
… indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.
But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.
It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.
Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.
And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.
Ignorance … is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.
The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.
There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
trouble always seems heavier when it is only one’s thought and not one’s bodily activity that is employed about it.
‘Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.
He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people’s opinions and feelings concerning himself.
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.
I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.
I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.
You must mind and not lower the Church in people’s eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.
What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?
Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.
I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.
Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly
We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.
Life’s a vast sea That does its mighty errand without fail, Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.
What is opportunity to the man who can’t use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.
A woman mixed of such fine elements That were all virtue and religion dead She’d make them newly, being what she was.
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
Women should be protected from anyone’s exercise of unrighteous power… but then, so should every other living creature.
Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling.
God, immortality, duty – how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.
Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.
The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
It is not true that a man’s intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
There’s things to put up wi’ in ivery place, an’ you may change an’ change an’ not better yourself when all’s said an’ done.
Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
… one’s own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can’t help groaning under the weight now and then.
Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.
Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.
Opinions: men’s thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments.
What people do who go into politics I can’t think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.
Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
… we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand.
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
It’s them as take advantage that get advantage I’ this world, I think: folks have to wait long enough afore it’s brought to ’em.
Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman’s heart has holier idols.
I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.
It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.
Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing.
There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.
The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.
It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don’t give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.
The mother’s love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.
There’s truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer; but whether it’s truth worth my knowing, is another question.
Fate has carried me ‘Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.
There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.
The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People’s lives and fortunes depend on them.
Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.
Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.
I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.
In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.
I don’t feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don’t know.
… in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.
Life is like our game at whist … I don’t enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.
Solomon’s Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos.
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn’t God’s will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.
There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.
The worst of all hobbies are those that people think they can get money at. They shoot their money down like corn out of a sack then.
Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature’s funeral cries For what has been and is not.
Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.
Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.
He had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
“Heaven help us,” said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
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.
We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.
I’d sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It’s better to know one’s robbed than to think one’s going to be murdered.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.
The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.
The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
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.
autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called ‘Memoirs.
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
You may try ‚Äî but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.
Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.
When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one’s finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
… it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.
I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.
A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.” ‚ÄîWORDSWORTH.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.
It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.
A bachelor’s children are always young: they’re immortal children – always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.
We look at the one little woman’s face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.
You youngsters nowadays think you’re to begin with living well and working easy; you’ve no notion of running afoot before you get on horseback.
The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.
One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
Women know no perfect love: Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong; Man clings because the being whom he loves Is weak and needs him.
The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.
I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world … profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.
I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us … like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.
What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?’ said Sir James. ‘He has one foot in the grave.’ ‘He means to draw it out again, I suppose.
I can’t bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.
Well, I aren’t like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there’s no good i’ speaking.
If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wineglass to the light and look judicial.
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.
Well, well, my boy, if good luck knocks at your door, don’t you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that’s all.
Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o’ God’s dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.
It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they’ve no way o’ working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine–something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.
There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
Some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside.
We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty ‚Äî it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
… learning to love any one is like an increase of property, — it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.
Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?
How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.
Strong souls Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength In farthest striving action; breathe more free In mighty anguish than in trivial ease.
I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
Anger seek it prey,– Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, Like not to go off hungry, leaving Love To feast on milk and honeycomb at will.
I have nothing to tell except travellers’ stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.
My books don’t seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
The tread Of coming footsteps cheats the midnight watcher Who holds her heart and waits to hear them pause, And hears them never pause, but pass and die.
Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.
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.
Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly — something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
To most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable – else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?
I’ve been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it’s not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.
There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,–that does not make a man sing or play the better.
To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.
I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one’s mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.
Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.
What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.
We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: – in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.
There are but two sorts of government: one where men show their teeth at each other, and one where men show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest.
The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world’s resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.
My childhood was full of deep sorrows – colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
… we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.
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.
Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.
there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.
It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings ‚Äì much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for ’em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that’s where it is.
The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,–whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,–which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.
Surely it is not true blessedness to be free of sorrow while there is sorrow and sin in the world. Sorrow is a part of love and love does not seek to throw it off.
When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are.
If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.
A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
… the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments, orthe dulness [sic] of our own jokes.
When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.
I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.
… the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.
When you’ve been used to doing things, and they’ve been taken away from you, it’s as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.
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‚Äîhe only saw the brightness of the Lord.
There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?
I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.
Satan was a blunderer … who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. … Everyone who contributes to the ‘too much’ of literature is doing grave social injury.
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!
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? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
It is a fact capable of amiable interpretation that ladies are not the worst disposed towards a new acquaintance of their own sex, because she has points of inferiority.
Our life is determined for us–and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and doing what is given us to do.
A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions; about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest.
To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline.
Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice.
I am feeling easy now, and you will well understand that after undergoing pain this ease is opening paradise. Invalids must be excused for being eloquent about themselves.
We are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom.
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.
All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; ‘Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!
Leisure is gone,–gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.
The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.
There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.
When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men’s indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.
The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.
What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.
The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.
Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.
There’s times when the crockery seems alive, an’ flies out o’ your hand like a bird. It’s like the glass, sometimes, ‘ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke.
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.
Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.
What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman’s face? And is there any harmony of tints that has such stirring of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?
Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism [sic] and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.
The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.
We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.
It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.
Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.
Unhappily the habit of being offensive ‘without meaning it’ leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.
A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.
I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.
Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and the sea is not within sight; that in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.
The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.
It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found – in loving obedience.
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.
The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.
Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?
It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive – when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.
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.
The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.
The idea of duty–that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self–is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.
If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
Primary (the LDS Church’s Sunday school for children) is where you go to do with somebody else’s mother the things you would do with your own mother if she weren’t so busy teaching Primary.
A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
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 small hungry shivering self.
Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.
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.
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.
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
Those bitter sorrows of childhood!– when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.
Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.
News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.
Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there’s no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.
Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid–too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.
I’ve had my say out, and I shall be the’ easier for’t all my life. There’s no pleasure i’ living, if you’re to be corked up forever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.
The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.
In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother’s knee.
I don’t mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.
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.
If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.
… there is a lightness about the feminine mind–a touch and go–music, the fine arts, that kind of thing–they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.
All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.
The best part of a woman’s love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall, ready to soothe the wearied feet.
The beauty of a lovely woman is like music … the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness–by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace.
Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.
It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.
The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite.
I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting – so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions.
Dear Friends all, A thousand Christmas pleasures and blessings to you — good resolutions and bright hopes for the New Year! Amen. People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be pious or affectionate.
Yes, Isaac Taylor, who has just published ‘The World of Mind,’ is the Isaac Taylor, author of the ‘Natural History of Enthusiasm.’ I dare say by this time there is a want of fatty particles in his brain.
What is better than to love and live with the loved? — But that must sometimes bring us to live with the dead; and this too turns at last into a very tranquil and sweet tie, safe from change and injury.
It seems to me as a woman’s face doesna want flowers; it’s almost like a flower itself…. It’s like when a man’s singing a good tune, you don’t want t’ hear bells tinkling and interfering wi’ the sound.
Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy.
The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food–it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on.
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
Her heart went out to him with a stronger movement than ever, at the thought that people would blame him. Maggie hated blame; she had been blamed her whole life, and nothing had come of it but evil tempers.
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
Ah, I often think it’s wi’ th’ old folks as it is wi’ the babies; they’re satisfied wi’ looking, no matter what they’re looking at. It’s God A’mighty’s way o’ quietening ’em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep.
There is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequences of his passions–does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread.
A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.
They the royal-hearted women are Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace For needy suffering lives in lowliest place, Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile, The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.
Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, And righteous or unrighteous, being done, Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself Be laid in stillness, and the universe Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind – the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
… as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.
Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.
He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose. . . .
A foreman, if he’s got a conscience, and delights in his work, will do his business as well as if he was a partner. I wouldn’t give a penny for a man as ‘ud drive a nail in slack because he didn’t get extra pay for it.
Expenditure–like ugliness and errors–becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.
I know forgiveness is a man’s duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you’re to give up all thoughts o’ taking revenge: it can never mean as you’re t’ have your old feelings back again, for that’s not possible.
Surely, surely the only one true knowledge of our fellow man is that which enables us to feel with him–which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.
You are discontented with the world because you can’t get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it’s a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.
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 remain innocently quiet.
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?
What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?
Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.
A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.
Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.
the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims … to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.
Things don’t happen because they’re bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There’s good chances and bad chances, and nobody’s luck is pulled only by one string.
When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.
The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.
The saints were cowards who stood by to see Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain– The grandest death, to die in vain–for love Greater than sways the forces of the world!
It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.
If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one’s inferiority — but it must be learned.
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 quality of the tree is made evident.
even those who call themselves ‘intimate’ know very little about each other – hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.
How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past‚Äîsensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he’s chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him. . . .
Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.
The perpetual mourner — the grief that can never be healed — is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day seems a new beginning — a new acquaintance with grief.
To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.
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 against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
I’ll tell you what’s the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion-the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That’s the steam that is to work the engines.
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change – only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.
There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.
Don’t let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid–necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love – when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism – the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .
It’s a strange thing to think of a man as can lift a chair with his teeth, and walk fifty mile on end, trembling and turning hot and cold at only a look from one woman out of all the rest i’ the world. It’s a mystery we can give no account of.
the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a ‘feature’ in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.
If I have read religious history aright, faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords; and it is possible, thank heaven! to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings.
What should I do‚Äîhow should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.
It is hard to believe long together that anything is “worth while,” unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.
There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then forever passed her by.
For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces – a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.
A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?
You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only es
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans – which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.
The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.
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 danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
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 distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.

But she took her husband’s jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that “men would be so”, and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.

I like to read about Moses best, in th’ Old Testament. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits; a man must have courage to look after his life so, and think what’ll come f it after he’s dead and gone.
Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes!
…Though there’s reasons in things as nobody knows on—- that’s pretty much what I’ve made out; yet some folks are so wise they’ll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason’s winking at ’em in the corner, and they niver see’t.
Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.
The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.
Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn’t come too late. It’s well we should feel as life’s a reckoning we can’t make twice over; there’s no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.
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 robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.
Are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life–a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?
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 no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.
When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business – that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.
Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.
When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.
For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.
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 or concession on his behalf. That is the sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue.
Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life‚îÄ‚îÄthe life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within‚îÄ‚îÄcan understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
Perhaps there is no time in a summer’s day more cheering, than when the warmth of the sun is just beginning to triumph over the freshness of the morning–when there is just a lingering hint of early coolness to keep off languor under the delicious influence of warmth.
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 ‚Äì that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool’s caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.
All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children — in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.
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 man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.
If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should to share those good things; but I should better to share in your trouble and your labour.
Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,–the ties that have made others dependent on us,–and would cut them in two.
There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.
and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.
Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, ‘mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample o’er the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhaltations laden with slow death, And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.
As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given us to guide our own steps; as the foot-soldier who hears nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle he is in, hears plainly enough the word of command that they must themselves obey.
Children demand that their heroes should be freckle less, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.
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 often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
The men are mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun ’em, an’ they can only catch ’em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man’s getting’s tongue ready; an’ when he outs wi’ his speech at last, there’s little broth to be made on’t. It’s your dead chicks take the longest hatchin’.
Letter-writing I imagine is counted as ‘work’ from which you must abstain, and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied notion that you will like to hear from me. You see, I have asked no questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence. Hence you have nothing to answer.
Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman’s living.
You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.
There’s nothing but what’s bearable as long as a man can work…. The square o’ four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man’s miserable as when he’s happy; and the best o’ working is, it gives you a grip hold o’ things outside your own lot.
Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before‚Äîconsequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts‚Äî not to hurt others.
All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one’s own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one’s private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!
Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
Fairy folk a-listening Hear the seed sprout in the spring, And for music to their dance Hear the hedgerows wake from trance, Sap that trembles into buds Sending little rhythmic floods Of fairy sound in fairy ears. Thus all beauty that appears Has birth as sound to finer sense And lighter-clad intelligence.
Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success.
How impossible it is for strong healthy people to understand the way in which bodily malaise and suffering eats at the root of one’s life! The philosophy that is true – the religion that is strength to the healthy – is constantly emptiness to one when the head is distracted and every sensation is oppressive.
Though I am not endowed with an ear to seize those earthly harmonies, which to some devout souls have seemed, as it were, the broken echoes of the heavenly choir–I apprehend that there is a law in music, disobedience whereunto would bring us in our singing to the level of shrieking maniacs or howling beasts.
Doesn’t this quote just call up feelings of comfort and home? Comparing friendship to the nest a bird lives in and builds with loving determination reminds me that having a solid relationship takes work and dedication. And yet, when you succeed in crafting a friendship, you can rest in the comfort it provides.
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
…there’s never a garden in all the parish but what there’s endless waste in it for want o’ somebody as could use everything up. It’s what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o’ victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it’s way to a mouth.
the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion–a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
But I think it is hardly an argument against a man’s general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn’t insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.
Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot-tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness; now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway.
There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature’s mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?
Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.
It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable–when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us–that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.
May I reach That purest heaven – be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.
… goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God’s individual call on her doesn’t condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.
A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.
May every soul that touches mine – be it the slightest contact – get there from some good; some little grace; one kindly thought; one aspiration yet unfelt; one bit of courage for the darkening sky; one gleam of faith to brave the thickening ills of life; one glimpse of brighter skies beyond the gathering mists – to make this life worthwhile.
Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.
Poor dog! I’ve a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to ’em because they couldn’t. I can’t help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there’s no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can’t say half what we feel, with all our words.
may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men’s search to vaster issues.
Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.’ I am not aware of 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 to her… I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.
Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.
I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest–I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
I might mention all the divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in your life utterly forgotten yourself in straining your eyes after the mounting lark, or in wandering through the still lanes when the fresh-opened blossoms fill them with a sacred silent beauty like that of fretted aisles, where would be the use of my descriptive catalogue?
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
The mother’s love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love–that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another.
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.
The disappointments of life can never, any more than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and most agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations, each heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him something corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable moodiness of the morbid and disagreeable.
What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.
Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed– Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought– Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer.
I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one’s own taste instead of reading other people’s! Home-made books must be so nice.
Dark the Night, with breath all flowers, And tender broken voice that fills With ravishment the listening hours,–Whisperings, wooings, Liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings In low-toned rhythm that love’s aching stills! Dark the night Yet is she bright, For in her dark she brings the mystic star, Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love, From some unknown afar.
… it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them.
In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses–and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak–there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified: by adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.
It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a person’s death consecrates him or her anew to us. It is as if life were not sacred too, as if it were comparatively a small thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother or sister who has to climb the whole toilsome mountain with us. It seems as if all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.
Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.
In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.
I can’t abide to see men throw away their tools i’ that way, the minute the clock begins to strike, as if they took no pleasure i’ their work, and was afraid o’ doing a stroke too much…. I hate to see a man’s arms drop down as if he was shot, before the clock’s fairly struck, just as if he’d never a bit o’ pride and delight in’s work. The very grindstone ‘ull go on turning a bit after you loose it.
For character too is a process and an unfoldingamong our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?
It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons.
It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas.
If people will be censors, let them weigh their words. I mean that the words were unfair by that disproportionateness of the condemnation, which everybody with some conscience must feel to be one of the great difficulties in denouncing a particular person. Every unpleasant dog is only one of many, but we kick him because he comes in our way, and there is always some want of distributive justice in the kicking.
Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions–there will be newly-opening needs–continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.
It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother’s bosom or rode on our father’s back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.
But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still – very wonderful things have happened!
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, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.
Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic – the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer – he scatters our sympathy among others than himself – and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.
I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don’t mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.
No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.
The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.
Young love-making–that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to–the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung–are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.
The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history–hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people-amongst whom your life is passed-that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire-for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.
Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.
Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called ‘educated’ making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? […] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness‚Äîin plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.
He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric.
I’ve seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion’s something else besides notions. It isn’t notions sets people doing the right things–it’s feelings. It’s the same with the notions in religion as it is with math’matics–a man may be able to work problems straight off in’s head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease.
Love is such a simple thing when we have only one-and-twenty summers and a sweet girl of seventeen trembles under our glance, as if she were a bud first opening her heart with wondering rapture to the morning. Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.
The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth, are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.
Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?
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 reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight-that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
Lord! Thou art with Thy people still; they see Thee in the night-watches, and their hearts burn within them as Thou talkest with them by the way. And Thou art near to those that have not known Thee; open their eyes that they may see Thee–see Thee weeping over them, and saying, “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life”–see Thee hanging on the cross and saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”–see Thee as Thou wilt come again in Thy glory to judge them at the last. Amen.
And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Middlemarch
For my part I am very sorry for him. 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 small hungry shivering self–never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.
Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.
the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is – I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles. … They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. 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 that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
I don’t remember ever being see-saw, when I’d made my mind up that a thing was wrong. It takes the taste out o’ my mouth for things, when I know I should have a heavy conscience after ’em. I’ve seen pretty clear, ever since I could cast up a sum, as you can never do what’s wrong without breeding sin and trouble more than you can ever see. It’s like a bit o’ bad workmanship–you never see th’ end o’ the mischief it’ll do. And it’s a poor look-out to come into the world to make your fellow creatures worse off instead o’ better.
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 self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate’s discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
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 their own lives–when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands.
Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge….wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.
One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young’s theory that “as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death.” Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!
Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer –committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutae¶ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish; but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief ‚Äî a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

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About George Eliot

Quotes by George Eliot