Top 380 Elizabeth Gaskell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “If all the world spoke, acted, or kept silence with intent to deceive, – if dearest interests were at stake, and dearest lives in peril, – if no one should ever know of her truth or her falsehood to measure out their honour or contempt for her by, straight alone where she stood, in the presence of God, she prayed that she might have strength to speak and act the truth for evermore.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

152. “But with the increase of serious and just ground of complaint, a new kind of patience had sprung up in her Mother’s mind. She was gentle and quiet in intense bodily suffering, almost in proportion as she had been restless and depressed when there had been no real cause for grief.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

153. “It is bad to believe you in error. It would be infinitely worse to have known you a hypocrite.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

154. “Opportunities are not often wanting where inclination goes before...”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

155. “She took her mind away with a wrench from the recollection of the past to the bright serene contemplation of the hopeful future.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

156. “He went away as if weights were tied to every limb that bore him from her.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

157. “I’m sure it was not wrong in morals, whatever it might be in judgement.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

158. “But Margaret was at an age when any apprehension, not absolutely based on a knowledge of facts, is easily banished for a time by a bright sunny day, or some happy outward circumstance. And when the brilliant fourteen fine days of October came on, her cares were all blown away as lightly as thistledown, and she thought of nothing but the glories of the forest.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

159. “A man,” as one of them observed to me once, “is so in the way in the house!”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

160. “I cannot stand objections. They make me so undecided.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

161. “Do I not know anxiety, though I go about well-dressed, and have food enough? Oh, Bessy, God is just, and our lots are well portioned out by Him, although none but He knows the bitterness of our souls.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

162. “If a wish could have transported her, she would have gone off; just for one day.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

163. “They had grown up together from childhood, and all along Edith had been remarked upon by every one, except Margaret, for her prettiness;.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

164. “She then thought the land enchanted into everlasting brightness and happiness; she fancied, then, that into a region so lovely no bale or woe could enter, but would be charmed away and disappear before the sight of the glorious guardian mountains. Now she knew the truth, that earth has no barrier which avails against agony.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

165. “How different men were to women!”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

166. “Pooh! away with love! Nay, my dear, we loved each other so dearly we should never have been happy with any one else; but that’s a different thing. People aren’t like what they were when we were young. All the love nowadays is just silly fancy, and sentimental romance, as far as I can see.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

167. “But I was right. I think that must be an hereditary quality, for my father says he is scarcely ever wrong.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

168. “It is not right to anticipate evil, and to be always looking forward with an apprehensive spirit; but I think grief is a two–edged sword, it cuts both ways; the memory of one loss is the anticipation of another.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

169. “Wherever she looked there was evidence of care and labour, but not care and labour to procure ease, to help on habits of tranquil home employment; solely to ornament, and then to preserve ornament from dirt or destruction.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

170. “There’s but one thing steady and quiet i’ all this reeling world, and, reason or no reason, I’ll cling to that.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

171. “But suppose it was truth double strong, it were no truth to me if I couldna take it in. I daresay there’s truth in yon Latin book on your shelves; but it’s gibberish and no truth to me, unless I know the meaning o’ the words.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

172. “But though “silver and gold he had none,” he gave heart-service and love – works of far more value.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

173. “Thus, you see, he arrived at the same end, via supposed duty, that he was previously pledged to via interest. I fancy a good number of us, when any line of action will promote our own interest, can make ourselves believe that reasons exist which compel us to it as a duty.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

174. “There was no need to struggle for their respect. He had it, and he knew it; and the security of this gave a fine grand quietness to his voice and ways, which Margaret had missed before. He.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

175. “He had not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his bones, and leanness goes a great way towards gentility.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

176. “She freshens me up above a bit. Who’d ha thought that face – as bright and as strong as the angel I dream of – could have known the sorrow she speaks on? I wonder how she’ll sin. All on us must sing.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

177. “What other people may think of the rightness or wrongness is nothing in comparison to my own deep knowledge, my innate conviction that it was wrong.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

178. “I did not think I had been so old,′ said Margaret after a pause of silence; and she turned away sighing. ‘Yes!’ said Mr. Bell. ‘It is the first changes among familiar things that make such a mystery of time to the young, afterwards we lose the sense of the mysterious. I take changes in all I see as a matter of course. The instability of all human things is familiar to me, to you it is new and oppressive.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

179. “Bessy, don’t be impatient with your life, whatever it is – or may have been. Remember who gave it you, and made it what it is!”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

180. “That night Mr. Hale laid his head down on the pillow on which it never more should stir with life. The servant who entered his room in the morning, received no answer to his speech; drew near the bed, and saw the calm, beautiful face lying white and cold under the ineffaceable seal of death. The attitude was exquisitely easy; there had been no pain – no struggle. The action of the heart must have ceased as he lay down.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

181. “When God gives a blessing to be enjoyed, He gives it with a duty to be done.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

182. “Pray, speak, sir; to see your face, and not be able to read it, gives me a worse dread than I trust any words of yours will justify.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

183. “Jemima was not pretty, the flatness and shortness of her face made her almost plain; yet most people looked twice at her expressive countenance, at the eyes which flamed or melted at every trifle, at the rich colour which came at every expressed emotion into her usually sallow face, at the faultless teeth which made her smile like a sunbeam.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

184. “For months past, all her own personal cares and troubles had had to be stuffed away into a dark cupboard; but now she had leisure to take them out, and mourn over them, and study their nature, and seek the true method of subduing them into the elements of peace. All these weeks she had been conscious of their existence in a dull kind of way, though they were hidden out of sight. Now, once for all she would consider them, and appoint to each of them its right work in her life.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

185. “Many a one has been comforted in their sorrow by seeing a good dish come upon the table.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

186. “Nay, nay!” said the Squire. “It’s not so easy to break one’s heart. Sometimes I’ve wished it were. But one has to go on living – ‘all the appointed days,’ as is said in the Bible.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

187. “I dare say there’s many a woman makes as sad a mistake as I have done, and only finds it out too late.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

188. “She had a fierce pleasure in the idea of telling Margaret unwelcome truths, in the shape of performance of duty.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

189. “He could remember all about it now; the pitiful figure he must have cut; the absurd way in which he had gone and done the very thing he had so often agreed with himself in thinking would be the most foolish thing in the world; and had met with exactly the consequences which, in these wise moods, he had always foretold were certain to follow, if he ever did make such a fool of himself.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

190. “When God will not use thee in one kind, yet He will in another. A soul that desires to serve and honour Him shall never want opportunity to do it; nor must thou so limit the Holy One of Israel as to think He hath but one way in which He can glorify Himself by thee.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

191. “The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes – when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

192. “He thought that he disliked seeing one who had mortified him so keenly; but he was mistaken. It was a stinging pleasure to be in the room with her, and feel her presence.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

193. “Oh dear! A drunken infidel weaver! said Mr. Hale to himself.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

194. “But he could not, you cannot, read the lot of those who daily pass you by in the street. How do you know the wild romances of their lives; the trials, the temptations they are even now enduring, resisting, sinking under?”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

195. “Ay! but mother’s words are scarce, and weigh heavy. Father’s liker me, and we talk a deal o’ rubble; but mother’s words are liker to hewn stone. She puts a deal o’ meaning in ’em.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

196. “A great matter calls her son with terms like deal, and love.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

197. “Oh dear! how she could have loved him if he had but been different, with a difference which she felt, on reflection, to be one that went low – deep down.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

198. “She found Nicholas busily engaged in making a penny spin on the dresser, for the amusement of three little children, who were clinging to him in a fearless manner. He, as well as they, was smiling at a good long spin;.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

199. “Molly suddenly felt as if she could scarcely keep from crying – a minute ago he had been so near to her, and talking so pleasantly and confidentially; and now he almost seemed as if he had forgotten her existence.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell

200. “I know we differ in our religious opinions; but don’t you give me credit for having some, though not the same as yours?”

— Elizabeth Gaskell