Date: 1814

"They have injured the finest mind!--for sometimes, Fanny, I own to you, it does appear more than manner; it appears as if the mind itself was tainted."

— Austen, Jane (1775-1817)

Date: 1814

"After being nursed up at Mansfield, it was too late in the day to be hardened at Portsmouth; and though Sir Thomas, had he known all, might have thought his niece in the most promising way of being starved, both mind and body, into a much juster value for Mr. Crawford's good company and good for...

— Austen, Jane (1775-1817)

Date: 1860

"Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one's ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"The pride and obstinacy of millers and other insignificant people, whom you pass unnoticingly on the road every day, have their tragedy too, but it is of that unwept, hidden sort, that goes on from generation to generation and leaves no record - such tragedy, perhaps, as lies in the conflicts of...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Although when Mr Wakem entered his office that morning, he had had no intention of purchasing Dorlcote Mill, his mind was already made up: Mrs Tulliver had suggested to him several determining motives, and his mental glance was very rapid: he was one of those men who can be prompt without being ...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"His faculties seemed to be renewing their strength from getting a footing on this demonstration of the senses."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"Our instructed vagrancy which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics and is at home with palms and banyans, - which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi can hardly get a dim notion of what an old-fashi...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"And so the poor child, with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism, and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding...

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"That is pain to me, and always will be pain, until my faculties lose their keenness, like aged eyes."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)

Date: 1860

"But you will not always be shut up in your present lot: why should you starve your mind in that way?"

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)