George Eliot

When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.

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

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

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

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

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

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

It is not known precisely where angels dwell whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

As Love ought to bring them together, so it is the best Way to keep them well together.

It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.

Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.