George Eliot

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

Nature has always had more force than education.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

Your mind will enchain you. Your heart will set you free.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

To be a citizen in a democracy, a human being must be given a healthy start.

We bust build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.