George Eliot

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner, or before taking their rest; when they are sick, or aged. In the morning, or when their intellect or their conscience has been aroused; when they hear music, or when they read poetry, they are radicals.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.