Still fuming.

In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held a bad opinion of her husband.

For there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom; there will be a land set for a halting-place of enmities, a neutral ground for the East as Belgium is for the West. Difficulties? I know there are difficulties.

All very well to ride on sticks at home and call them ideas.

We have some very nice Americans here.

She was not a woman weakly to accommodate herself to shilly-shally proceedings.

Surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.

There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike called love.

Too hot and hasty now.

Even the slow, slime-loving crocodile, The last of animals to take a hint, Will then retire forever from a scene Where public feeling strongly sets against him.

That's the way with 'em all: it's as if they thought the world 'ud be new-made because they're to be married.

“I wouldn’t give twopence for him” — here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers— “whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.”

Romola shuddered at the possibility. All the instruction, all the main influences of her life had gone to fortify her scorn of that sickly superstition which led men & women, w/eyes too weak for the daylight, to sit in dark swamps & try to read human destiny by the chance flame of wandering vapours.

The only persons who could ever have had positive knowledge to contradict him, were Fra Luca, who was dead, and the crew of the companion galley, who had brought him the news of the encounter with the pirates.

With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

Deronda and Mordecai were soon in the street together, and without any explicit agreement as to their direction.

She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.

“Where blooms, O my father, a thornless rose?”

You have not the best of it in all things, O youngsters!

Tell the most impassioned orator, suddenly, that his wig is awry, or his shirt-lap hanging out, and that he is tickling people by the oddity of his person, instead of thrilling them by the energy of his periods, and you would infallibly dry up the spring of his eloquence.

It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.

They had now reached the Prato, which at that time was a large open space within the walls, where the Florentine youth played at their favourite Calcio — a peculiar kind of football.

Easy enough, by the aid of the nicks.

Steal the keys from snoring Destiny And make the prophets lie.

You will wonder what has wrought me up into this fury—it is the loathsome fawning, the transparent hypocrisy, the systematic giving as little as possible for as much as possible that one meets with here at every turn. I feel that society is training men and women for hell.

The fond Present, that with mother-prayers And mother-fancies looks for championship.

And in the Odyssey–that’s a beautiful poem–there’s a more wonderful giant than Goliath,–Polypheme, who had only one eye in the middle of his forehead;

Giles, wasn’t his name?

They'll give us plenty of heaven. We may have land there. That's the sort of religion they like—a religion that gives us workingmen heaven, and nothing else.

Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty.

Puny blossoms now, But in the world’s great morrows to expand With broadest petal and with deepest glow.

Pride helps us.

“We could live quite well on my own fortune—it is too much—seven hundred a-year—I want so little—no new clothes—and I will learn what everything costs.”

It would be like marrying Pascal.

Every day, after reading the Times, I feel as if all one’s writing were miserably trivial stuff in the presence of this daily history.

I am in a hurry today. Mr. C. wants me for something and I must have 2 hours’ work before dinner. So imagine everything I have not said or rather reflect that this scrap is quite as much as you deserve after being so slow to write to me. Your affectionate Pollian.

The gods of the hearth exist for us still; and let all new faith be tolerant of that fetishism, lest it bruise its own roots.

Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative. Presently she said, "I cannot think how it all came about." Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story. "I dare say not," said Dorothea, pinching her sister's chin.

“Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive impulse:

Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer him to the Divine regard with perfect confidence;

She awoke from that vivid dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper rest. She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and in the gathering darkness something like a star appeared.

For my part, I think it's better to see when your perpendicular's true than to see a ghost.

Slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as “light,” “sound,” “stars,” “music”—

“It must be ‘Let us take the road,’ then,” said Stephen.

“Adieu, ‘graceful consort,’” said Stephen, buttoning his coat across when he had done singing.

Our nimble souls Can spin an insubstantial universe Suiting our mood, and call it possible, Sooner than see one grain with eye exact And give strict record of it.

Those who trust us educate us.

A charlatan in religion is sure to like other sorts of charlatans.

We mean to do wicked things that we never could do, just as we mean to do good or clever things that we never could do. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better than we are.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa,