George Eliot

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

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.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

It is possible to be free and loving no matter what your circumstances.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Well, when it comes to social media – there are just times I turn off the world, you know. There are just some times you have to give yourself space to be quiet, which means you’ve got to set those phones down. You can’t be reading all that stuff. I mean, that’s like letting somebody just walk up and slap you, you know? You would never do that. You would never just sit there and go, slap me in the face and I’m good with it. No. So why would you open yourself up to that?

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.