George Eliot

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 hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

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.

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.

A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.

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.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so .

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

As they who make Good luck a god count all unlucky men.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

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

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude- roots that can be pulled up.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.

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.

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.

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.