George Eliot

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.

It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call __od__ birds_ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

It seems as you'll never know the rights of it; but that doesn't hinder there being a rights, Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.''No,' said Silas, 'no; that doesn't hinder. Since the time the child was sent to me and I've come to love her as myself, I've had light enough to trusten by; and now she says she'll never leave me, I think I shall trusten until I die.

The devil tempts us not; 'tis we who tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.

One__ self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

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

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

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

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business _ that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.