I don’t mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.
I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting – so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions.
There’s good chances and bad chances, and nobody’s luck is pulled only by one string.
I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.
I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one’s mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.
As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love – when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.
Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on.
I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.
It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.
Unhappily the habit of being offensive ‘without meaning it’ leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.
I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.
I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.
In the ages since Adam’s marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.
A bachelor’s children are always young: they’re immortal children – always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.
You are discontented with the world because you can’t get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it’s a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.