George Eliot

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

Haste makes Work which Caution prevents.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Death comes to all, but great achievements build a monument which shall endure until the sun grows cold.

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.