George Eliot

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing. That’s my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

When setting out on a journey, do not seek advice from those who have never left home.

Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

The advice that is wanted is commonly not welcome and that which is not wanted, evidently an effrontery.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

He that will enjoy the brightness of sunshine, must quit the coolness of the shade.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Every great man, every successful man, no matter what the field of endeavor, has known the magic that lies in these words: every adversity has the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.

It’s the ones that stayed after the Exodus, that I knew were real and could handle the truth; that would stay with me on my journey, for better or worse.