What a wretched lot of old shriveled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
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.
When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.
George Eliot (1819 - 1880)
Source: Felix Holt, The Radical, Author's Introduction, 1866.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.
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