Middlemarch

Famous quotes

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

  First lines.In context

  • Beauty

• Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

  Book I: Miss Brooke, Chapter IIn context

  • Comedy

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

  Book I: Miss Brooke, Chapter VIIn context

  • Pride

• Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

  Book II: Old and Young, Chapter XVIn context

  • Character
  • Pride

• One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

  Book II: Old and Young, Chapter XVIIIn context

  • Charity
  • Money

• 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 quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

  Book II: Old and Young, Chapter XXIn context

  • Emotion

• In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.

  Book III: Waiting for Death, Chapter XXXIIn context

  • Failure

• 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.

  Book IV: Three Love Problems, Chapter XLIIIn context

  • Character

• What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

  In context

• But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

  In context

  • Hope

• If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.

  Book VI: The Widow and the Wife, Chapter LVIn context

  • Hope
  • Youth

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

  In context

  • Life & Death

• People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

  Book VIII: Sunset and Sunrise, Chapter LXXIIIn context

  • Courage

• Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

  In context

  • Change

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

  FinaleIn context

  • Character

• 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.

  FinaleIn context

  • History
  • Virtue

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