George Eliot

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

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.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know, I’ve done it a thousand times.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the 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. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.

When you know to laugh and when to look upon things as too absurd to take seriously, the other person is ashamed to carry through even if he was serious about it.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

None of us should be defined by the worst thing we’ve ever done.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind.

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.