Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage -- the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Might, could, would --they are contemptible auxiliaries.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

If Abu Nidal is a terrorist, then so is George Washington. (Reply to President Ronald Reagan in defense of Palestinian terrorist)

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

George May the wind always be at your back and the sun upon your face. Fred And may the winds of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

I just remember George smiling and how happy he was.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans --which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?-T.S. Eliot

Wear a smile and have friends, wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities --a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces --a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

George Orwell was an optimist.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more that they can choose their birthplace, or their father or mother.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

Animals are such agreeable friends, they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovaryisme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

People think my friend George is weird because he wears sideburns...behind his ears. I think he's weird because he wears false teeth...with braces on them.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

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

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved.

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.

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. As it is, the best of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.