Middlemarch

His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it did only what it could do without any trouble.

Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on.

Sir James felt with some sadness that she was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment.

These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.

He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had looked up at Mr Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm towards fifty,

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge.

‘You will have many lonely hours, Dorothea, for I shall be constrained to make the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel more at liberty if you had a companion.’ The words ‘I should feel more at liberty’ grated on Dorothea. For the first time in speaking to Mr Casaubon she coloured from annoyance.

it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Greek. Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly. As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed

Will’s generous reliance on the intentions of the universe with regard to himself. He held that reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility, but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in particular.