George Eliot

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Why do the words I want to say, struggle to come out of my mouth. Why does fear have such a grip over me. I shouldn’t have to battle to say all the complimentary things I so desperately want to share. It shouldn’t be this hard, that I have to force myself; it’s wrong that such loving words, should have to be spoken under such duress. I’m aware of how wrong it is, but withholding is all I have known, even though I desire so badly to share my thoughts and feelings with you, as freely as you do with me.

To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

The person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn’t likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

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.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

Always seeking acceptance from others, searching for belonging. Striving for individuality, yet wanting to fit in. Never understanding that acceptance for one’s own individuality make all of that redundant.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

It is all right to rat, but you can’t re-rat.