Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Middlemarch

Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.