259 quotes
I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.
Middlemarch (1871)
All the learnin’ my father ever paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and the alphabet at th’ other.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return . . .
Daniel Deronda (1876)
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
Adam Bede (1859)
Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
Middlemarch (1871)
‘Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills.’
Middlemarch (1871)
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
The world would have a new dreariness for her, as a wilderness that a magician's spells had turned for a little while into a garden.
Middlemarch (1871)
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Daniel Deronda (1876)
Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
'Tis a petty kind of fame
At best, that comes of making violins;
And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go
To purgatory none the less.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
Adam Bede (1859)
Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.
Adam Bede (1859)
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
Middlemarch (1871)
Friend more divine than all divinities.
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)
Our life is determined for us — and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do.
The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.
Middlemarch (1871)
Such patience have the heroes who begin,
Sailing the first toward lands which others win.
The Legend of Jubal (1869)
In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.
Middlemarch (1871)