George Eliot

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

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.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

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.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

The future is purchased by the present.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

When one has tasted it Watermelon he knows what the angels eat.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man walking into the little booth with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

In this country it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others.

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.