George Eliot

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.

Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he wanted. He lived happily ever after.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

But real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Courage is exhilarating.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till the other is ready, and it may be along time before they get off.

Private men, in fine, are so much their own, that, paying common dues, they are sovereigns of all the rest. Yet the public must and will be served; and they that do it well, deserve public marks of honour and respect. To do so, men must have public minds, as well as salaries; or they will serve private ends at the public cost. Government can never be well administered, but where those intrusted make conscience of well discharging their places.