George Eliot

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.

No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance?

It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving.

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.

For the human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

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 diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge.

Such colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced weavers, whose unnurtured souls have been like young winged things, fluttering forsaken in the twilight.

But cheerful, successful worldliness has a false air of being more selfish than the acrid, unsuccessful kind, whose secret history is summed up in the terrible words, “Sold, but not paid for.”

We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year’s crop.

The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour’s child to “stop the fits,” may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; but the generous stirring of neighbourly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost.

“Not an obolus, by Jupiter!” he murmured, in a language which was not Tuscan or even Italian. “I thought I had one poor piece left. I must get my breakfast for love, then!”

Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on.

Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

I don’t believe it. I never saw a married woman who had her own way.

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.

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Ineffable moment! when the man you secretly hate sends you a Latin epigram with a false gender

He has certainly been drying up faster since the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose.

He began to think it was conscious of him, as his loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces.