George Eliot

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other, to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

Consequences are unpitying.

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.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

It always seems impossible until its done.

In all evils which admits a remedy, impatience should be avoided, because it wastes the time and attention in complaints which, if properly applied, might remove the cause.

What do sad complaints avail if the offense is not cut down by punishment.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Where Example keeps pace with Authority, Power hardly fails to be obey’d.

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

The eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.

It is a lesson which all history teaches wise men, to put trust in ideas, and not in circumstances.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

I shall strike the stars with my unlifted head.

You are much surer that you are doing good when you pay money to those who work, as the recompense of their labor, than when you give money merely in charity.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.

Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. As Charles De Gaulle said, the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.