I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate.

Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Of all forms of human error, prophesy is the most avoidable.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.