George Eliot

His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty.

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

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.

Nothing is black or white.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.

It’s a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.

He that lives to forever, never fears dying.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

You are perfect. An exquisitely fine work of art, labor of love, suspended in silence. Bejeweled, trembling, kissed by a breeze, mesmerized by your beauty. You await in silence, beckoning me to a silken-wrapped slumber.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.