George Eliot, Adam Bede Quotes
What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.
Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.
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.
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.
Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's
Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.
In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception.
College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.
He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.
She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood.
My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.
It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.
The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.
In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.
Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.
Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.
A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation.
A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest.