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 business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.

We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.

How impossible it is for strong healthy people to understand the way in which bodily malaise and suffering eats at the root of one's life! The philosophy that is true - the religion that is strength to the healthy - is constantly emptiness to one when the head is distracted and every sensation is oppressive.

Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.