George Eliot

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.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Knowledge is the treasure, but judgment is the treasurer of the one who is wise.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

Virtue is too often merely local.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

Love is only one of many passions.