... that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when one is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
George Eliot (Romola—Nello speaking).
George Eliot is quoting the Latin proverb, Amor tussisque non celantur. It is also found in George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum, 1640. The same proverb appears with all sorts of variations, “love and a sneeze,” “love and smoke,” “love and a red nose,” “love and poverty,” etc., being the things that cannot be hidden. “Love and murder will out” (Congreve, The Double Dealer, Act IV, 2). (I took these instances from some collection of proverbs.)
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish;—be it so!