George Eliot

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

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

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

A cynic can chill and dishearten with a single word.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Zeal ever follows an appearance of truth, and the assured are too apt to be warm; but it is their weak side in argument; zeal being better shown against sin than persons, or their mistakes.

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

We falsely attribute to men a determined character, putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support, it is worse than a large family, he is the silent poor indeed.

Watch what you say, and whatever you say, practice it.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.