George Eliot

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

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

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

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.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.

It is wonderful to think how men of very large estates not only spend their yearly income, but are often actually in want of money. It is clear, they have not value for what they spend.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lift human life above the level of farce and give it some of the grace of tragedy.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.

I teach that all men are mad.

Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.