George Eliot

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other, to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

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.

The way to do well is to do well.

Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

The Pause; that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

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

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

The sum of wisdom is that time is never lost that is devoted to work.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.