Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.

You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.

I not only want to be loved, I want to be told that I'm loved.

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

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

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.