George Eliot

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

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 we had a keen vision and feeling it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Kisses honeyed by oblivion.

I'm not one o' those as can see the cat i' the dairy, an' wonder what she's come after.

Ignorance. . . is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

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.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.