George Eliot

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

We love and lose in China, we weep on England’s moors, and laugh and moan in Guinea, and thrive on Spanish shores. We seek success in Finland, are born and die in Maine. In minor ways we differ, in major we’re the same.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

I am the captain of my soul.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.

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

All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.