259 quotes
All things journey: sun and moon,
Morning, noon, and afternoon,
Night and all her stars;
Twixt the east and western bars
Round they journey,
Come and go!
We go with them!
Spanish Gypsy (1868)
It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people's hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman's End.
Middlemarch (1871)
But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp.
Middlemarch (1871)
One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
... that modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing — not themselves but — all their neighbours.
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)
So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)
Jubal was not a name to wed with mockery.
Two rushed upon him: two, the most devout
In honor of great Jubal, thrust him out,
And beat him with their flutes.
The Legend of Jubal (1869)
Lamech's sons were heroes of their race:
Jubal, the eldest, bore upon his face
The look of that calm river-god, the Nile,
Mildly secure in power that needs not guile.
The Legend of Jubal (1869)
But then the need of being loved, the strongest need ... in poor Maggie's nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Travelling can hardly be without a continual current of disappointment, if the main object is not the enlargement of one’s general life, so as to make even weariness and annoyances enter into the sum of benefit.
It seems to me now, if I was to find Father at home to-night, I should behave different; but there's no knowing — perhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.
Adam Bede (1859)
There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
Adam Bede (1859)
[N]o sort of duplicity can long flourish without the help of vocal falsehoods
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861)
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness
Romola (1863)
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 to have recovered hope.
Adam Bede (1859)
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?
Adam Bede (1859)
O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues.
O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)
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.
Middlemarch (1871)