Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man; some think even greater.

But I pine in Solitude. Solitude is my undoing.

Middlemarch, the magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.

old emotions like old families have intermarried and have many connections.