George Eliot

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

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

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Every burned book enlightens the world.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it.

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible.

The third component of the Law of Dharma is service to humanity–to serve your fellow human beings and to ask yourself the questions,How can I help? How can I help all those that I come into contact with? When you combine the ability to express your unique talent with service to humanity, then you make full use of the Law of Dharma.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.