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.

The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.