Middlemarch

by George Eliot

He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable.

Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won’t keep shape.”

One can begin so many things with a new person!—even begin to be a better man.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.”

for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part.

thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.

irritated feeling with him, as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge.

When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.

We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own case, link us indissolubly with the established order.

it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.”

But we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.

“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.”

that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a companion who would never find it out.