Does one who has been all but lost in a pit of darkness complain of the sweet air and the daylight? There is a way of looking at our life daily as an escape, and taking the quiet return of morn and evening – still more the star-like out-glowing of some pure fellow-feeling, some generous impulse breaking our inward darkness – as a salvation that reconciles us to hardship. Those who have a self-knowledge prompting such self-accusation as Hamlet’s, can understand this habitual feeling of rescue.
But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world: I see enough of that every day.
For the Squire’s wife had died long ago, and the Red House was without that presence of the wife and mother which is the fountain of wholesome love and fear in parlour and kitchen; and.
The sense of blessedness in his own lot had yet an aching anxiety at his heart: this may be held paradoxical, for the beloved lover is always called happy, and happiness is considered as a well-fleshed indifference to sorrow outside it. But human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current, talk or even current philosophy.
It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it... Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy – the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.
I rather like a haughty manner. I cannot endure a rattling young man.
The rain is quite over now. I told Mr Brooke not to call for me: I would rather walk the five miles. I shall strike across Halsell Common, and see the gleams on the wet grass. I like that.
To people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection.
In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth.
He turned immediately towards the hearth, where Silas Marner sat lulling the child. She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep – only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky – before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.
I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the doorsill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present.
Did ever a ghost give a man a black eye? That’s what I should like to know. If ghos’es want me to believe in ‘em, let ‘em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places–let ’em come where there’s company and candles.
The conduct that issues from a moral conflict has often so close resemblance to vice that the distinction escapes all outward judgments founded on a mere comparison of actions. -Book 6, chapter 9.
The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!
He would never have contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no motive for obstinacy in her absurdities.
The tenacity with which he strove to hide this inward drama made it the more vivid for him; as we hear with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.
A man’s mind–what there is of it–has always the advantage of being masculine,–as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,–and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.
I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.
It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.