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The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

George Eliot

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George Eliot
Age: 61 †
Born: 1819
Born: November 22
Died: 1880
Died: December 22
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
Mary Anne Evans
Mary Ann Evans
Marian Evans
Mary Anne Evans Cross
Mary Anne Cross
Men
Consciousness
Knowing
Chiefly
Wish
Gentlemen
Difficult
Wishes
Another
Gentleman
Young
Task
Soul
Tasks
Made
Whose

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But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.
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Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.
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It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
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But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that men would be so, and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.
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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.
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Ignorance ... is a painless evil so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.
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There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.
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Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
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Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.
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Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains blends yearning and repulsion and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
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It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.
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Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
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So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.
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Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.
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A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
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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.
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It seems to me as a woman's face doesna want flowers it's almost like a flower itself.... It's like when a man's singing a good tune, you don't want t' hear bells tinkling and interfering wi' the sound.
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There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
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In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
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Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.
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