Quotes from Middlemarch

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

And, of course, men know best about everything, except what women know better.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa?

Character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, 'Oh, nothing!'

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women.

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.

These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.

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.

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable.

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personæ folded in her hand.

Lydgate's spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.