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101 " The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama. "
― George Eliot , Middlemarch
102 " I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so. "
103 " How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts? "
104 " It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men’s dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for. "
105 " Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide. "
― George Eliot , The Mill on the Floss
106 " Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow. "
― George Eliot , Adam Bede
107 " Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. "
― George Eliot , Silas Marner
108 " For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. "
109 " After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think. "
110 " What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self. "
― George Eliot
111 " When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child. "
112 " She hates everything that is not what she longs for. "
113 " Don't judge a book by its cover "
114 " I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you. "
115 " We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born. "
116 " Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side. "
117 " Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle. "
118 " When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures. "
119 " We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society. "
120 " The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. "