Middlemarch quotes

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for 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.

To think with pleasure of his niece’s husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing—to make a Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XLIII

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.

“I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,” said Dorothea.

— Dorothea · Chapter LXXII

And, of course, men know best about everything, except what women know better.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter LXXII

He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on Rosamond’s blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

— Spoken by a character · Chapter XIX

“character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

— Mr. Farebrother · Chapter LXXII

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