Those who trust us educate us.
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
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 have recovered hope.
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.
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.
A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.
You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody
Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.
If you live for people’s acceptance, you’ll die from their rejections.
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.
I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.
Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
