George Eliot

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

Be true to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant to break the monotony of a decorous age.

Count on it, if a person talks of their misfortune, there is something in it that is not disagreeable to them.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. He was reputed one of the wise men that made answer to the question, when a man should marryA young man not yet, an elder man not at all.

To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

I could not find the world if I searched ten years. I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.