A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it. — George Eliot Copy Share Image
... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something… — George Eliot Copy Share Image
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born. — George Eliot Copy Share Image
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's… — George Eliot Copy Share Image
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact… — George Eliot Copy Share Image
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity. — George Eliot Copy Share Image
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with… — George Eliot Copy Share Image
Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be… — George Eliot Copy Share Image
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles. — George Eliot Copy Share
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on… — George Eliot Copy Share
Scepticismcan never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill. — George Eliot Copy Share
Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. — George Eliot Copy Share
The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from… — George Eliot Copy Share
“[W]e must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range… — George Eliot Copy Share
“Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out… — George Eliot Copy Share
“... she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex… — George Eliot Copy Share
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity. — George Eliot Copy Share
And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better. — George Eliot Copy Share
“But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure… — George Eliot Copy Share
“But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells… — George Eliot Copy Share
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial… — George Eliot Copy Share
“Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.” — George Eliot Copy Share
even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt… — George Eliot Copy Share
