George Eliot

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

Read your own compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.

Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

When many demons are struggling inside you, the one that you feed is the one that will become the strongest. You alone are responsible for what you feed.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.

The wilderness is near as well as dear to every man. Even the oldest villages are indebted to the border of wild wood which surrounds them, more than to the gardens of men. There is something indescribably inspiriting and beautiful in the aspect of the forest skirting and occasionally jutting into the midst of new towns, which, like the sand-heaps of fresh fox-burrows, have sprung up in their midst. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

I wish for you the wisdom to realize that forgiveness has nothing to do with an apology.

If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.