It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
— George Eliot
Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.
When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
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.
A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.
A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
In every parting there is an image of death.
It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
