Z.’s Reviews > Felix Holt: The Radical > Status Update

“But—if [what Esther wanted] was to be had at all—it was not to be had without paying a heavy price for it, such as we must pay for all that is greatly good. . . . It is not true that love makes all things easy: it makes us choose what is difficult.”

"And while public opinion is what it is—while men have no better beliefs about public duty—while corruption is not felt to be a damning disgrace—while men are not ashamed in Parliament and out of it to make public questions which concern the welfare of millions a mere screen for their own petty private ends,—I say, no fresh scheme of voting will much mend our condition."

“But I don’t think myself a fine fellow because I’m melancholy. I don’t measure my force by the negations within me, and think my soul must be a mighty one because it is more given to idle suffering than to beneficent activity.”

“Felix felt himself in danger of getting into a rage. There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.”

"Every sentence was as pleasant to her as if it had been cut in her bared arm. Some men's kindness and love-making are more exasperating, more humiliating than others' derision . . ."

"These social changes in Treby parish are comparatively public matters, and this history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life, from the time when the primeval milkmaid had to wander with the wanderings of her clan, because the cow she milked was one of a herd which had made the pastures bare."

“[F]or there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. . . . Many an inherited sorrow that had marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.”