George Eliot

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical 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.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

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.

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.