Quotes from George Eliot, Middlemarch

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.

Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask...

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

It is just that I don't know how I could live without the hope of her. It would be like learning to live with wooden legs.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

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.

Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

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.

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.

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

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

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.

Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.

I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.

I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.

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

What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.

But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.