George Eliot

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

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.

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

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

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

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequences of a position, or perceive the difficulties by which cooler and more experienced reasoners are restrained from confidence, they form their conclusions with great precipitance. Seeing nothing that can darken or embarrass the question, they expect to find their own opinion universally prevalent, and are inclined to impute uncertainty and hesitation to want of honesty, rather than of knowledge.

The person is a poor judge who by an action can be disgraced more in failing than they can be honored in succeeding.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

There are a lot of people who lie and get away with it, and that’s just a fact.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discovers to me his existence.

Important encounters are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other.

It’s hard to have it all. And if you’re compromising through one phase of your journey, you’re not giving it all up, you’re compromising for that phase

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.