George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss (1860)

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People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes...

George Eliot
There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories, no superadded life in the life of others.

George Eliot
Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them.

George Eliot
These 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.

George Eliot
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.

George Eliot
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.

George Eliot
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

George Eliot
High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.

George Eliot
We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.

George Eliot
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.

George Eliot
There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.

George Eliot
She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, — when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.

George Eliot
If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.

George Eliot
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.

George Eliot
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 make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.

George Eliot
It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent — like a carrier pigeon.

George Eliot
'Character' says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—'character is destiny.'

George Eliot
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

George Eliot
Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.

George Eliot
But then the need of being loved, the strongest need … in poor Maggie's nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it.

George Eliot
Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes.

George Eliot
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot