To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
— George Eliot
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
Excessive literary production is a social offense.
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.
All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.
That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.
I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
Breed is stronger than pasture.
Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
Consequences are unpitying.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
