George Eliot

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

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

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

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.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.

There is still vitality under the winter snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

Coercion is evil precisely because it…eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.