George Eliot

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

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.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it.

What’s the point of having great knowledge and keeping them all to yourself?

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

The first farmer was the first man. All historic nobility rests on the possession and use of land.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it.

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.