George Eliot

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

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. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer –committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use the pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time; a tremendous whack.

Seek not to be Rich, but Happy. The one lies in Bags, the other in Content: which Wealth can never give.

Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition. He that sinks under the fatigue of getting wealth, lulls his age with the milder business of saving it.

Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.

If you want the moon, do not hide from the night. If you want a rose, do not hide from the thorns. If you want love, do not hide from yourself.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

You cannot run faster than a bullet.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.

The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

If a man’s fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

The one who cannot restrain their anger will wish undone, what their temper and irritation prompted them to do.