George Eliot

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.

Pity is for living, envy is for dead.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

It’s not burn baby burn, but learn, baby, learn, so that you can earn, baby, earn.

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.