George Eliot

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

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

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric 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.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars Englandhe should have said Britain, of coursealways wins one battlethe last.

All those moments are alive in us today. We may not visit them anymore, very often, but we carry them in our DNA, our blood, our bones; informing the breadth and beauty of who we now are; our lesson to be lived.

New ideas come into this world somewhat like falling meteors, with a flash and an explosion, and perhaps somebody

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

Anger is a brief lunacy.

The more experiments you make the better.

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

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.