George Eliot

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice…

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Ah! Sir, a boy’s being flogged is not so severe as a man’s having the hiss of the world against him.

Your mind will enchain you. Your heart will set you free.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

Revolutions go not backward.

Sobriety, severity, and self-respect are the foundations of all true sociality.

The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Let us then try what love can do to mend a broken world.

People of great position are servants times three, servants of their country, servants of fame, and servants of business.

Treating your adversary with respect is giving him an advantage to which he is not entitled.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. In fact it is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.