George Eliot

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

The world is its own magic.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won’t sit upon a cold stove lid, either.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

I believe in the limitlessness of humans. We’re capable of incredible things. At times that realization is frightening.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker upon the planet. Then all things are at risk.

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

Wherever work is done, victory is attained.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.