259 quotes
Fate has carried me
'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand—
Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast
To pierce another.
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)
It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop.
Adam Bede (1859)
Our joy is dead, and only smiles on us.
Spanish Gypsy (1868)
When you see fair hair
Be pitiful.
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)
‘I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known— ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.’
Middlemarch (1871)
It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.
Daniel Deronda (1876)
I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience. I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men.
The Lifted Veil (1859)
[Mr Johnson] "You know what a Tory is – one who wants to drive the working men as he'd drive cattle."
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)
No farther will I travel: once again
My brethren I will see, and that fair plain
Where I and song were born.
The Legend of Jubal (1869)
Each day saw the birth
Of various forms, which, flung upon the earth,
Seemed harmless toys to cheat the exacting hour,
But were as seeds instinct with hidden power.
The Legend of Jubal (1869)
I began ... to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)
The law was sacred. Yes, but rebellion might be sacred too. It flashed upon her mind that the problem before her was essentially the same as that which had lain before Savonarola—the problem where the sacredness of obedience ended, and where the sacredness of rebellion began.
Romola (1863)
There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.
Adam Bede (1859)
Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.
Adam Bede (1859)
When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss
At lightest thrill from the bee's swinging chime,
Because the one so near the other is.
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
Adam Bede (1859)
If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world.
Middlemarch (1871)
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
Adam Bede (1859)
If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)