George Eliot

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they’re gone.

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.

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.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Your fingers caress my heart strings, shaping a silent sonnet in notes of love. Transcending space and time, bathing the ether in perfect harmony.

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

It is only through labour and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage; that we move on to better things.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

When one has tasted it Watermelon he knows what the angels eat.

If thou art clean and warm, it is sufficient; for more doth but rob the Poor, and please the Wanton.

He that fails in his endeavors after wealth or power will not long retain either honesty or courage.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

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