George Eliot

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

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

Consequences are unpitying.

Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

The amount of people in this world who are here to do something great far outweighs the rest.

Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Equivocation is half-way to lying, and lying the whole way to hell.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.