Date: 1860

"Such things, uttered in low broken tones by the one voice that has first stirred the fibre of young passion, have only a feeble effect -- on experienced minds at a distance from them."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"There was a moment of utter bewilderment before her mind could get disentangled from the confused web of dreams; but soon the whole terrible truth urged itself upon her"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment or whether we will renounce that for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us -- for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests except the retention of his snuffbox, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"In the beginning of dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1871-2, 1874

"My mind is something like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and confusing changes."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1887

"You see, he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose."

— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)

Date: 1887

"A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

— Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)