George Eliot

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

Knowledge comes by eyes always open and working hands; and there is no knowledge that is not power.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.

Love is only one of many passions.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

Nothing does more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

Women are like tea bags. You never know how strong they are until they are in hot water.

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly-full of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.

All colors will agree in the dark.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.