George Eliot

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.’ I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her… I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed.

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.

One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

What we become depends on what our fathers teach us.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

Mementos of this world, in which the things worth being were so easily exchanged for the things worth having.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.