George Eliot

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

We should come home from adventures and perils and discoveries with new experiences and character.

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.

Such as take lodgings in a head that’s to be let unfurnished.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others… This is one of the disadvantages of wine, it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.