George Eliot

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.

Don't judge a book by its cover

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

Selfish — a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

"We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts — not to hurt others."

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It is in the slow, changed life that follows — in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain — in the time when day follows day in dull unexpectant sameness, and trial is a dreary routine — it is then that despair threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.