George Eliot

Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.

I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.

May every soul that touches mine - be it the slightest contact - get there from some good; some little grace; one kindly thought; one aspiration yet unfelt; one bit of courage for the darkening sky; one gleam of faith to brave the thickening ills of life; one glimpse of brighter skies beyond the gathering mists - to make this life worthwhile.

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience_x000D_ _x000D_ has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling_x000D_ _x000D_ within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength._x000D_ _x000D_ We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians_x000D_ _x000D_ can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas.

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.

The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckle less, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.

One can say everything best over a meal.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.