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The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

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
Command
Narrowest
Ideals
Pant
Find
Curiously
Nothing
Unison
Enough
Natures
Great
Select
Love
Reverence
Ideal

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When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.
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To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.
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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.
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All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!
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We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.
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One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
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Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.
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It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
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... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.
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Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.
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Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid--necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
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The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities it is an expansion of the animal existence.
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It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
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Consequences are unpitying.
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I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.
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Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.' I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.
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The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
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A maggot must be born i' the rotten cheese to like it.
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Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
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