George Eliot

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

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.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.

A man’s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.