George Eliot

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives… They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

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

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

In all our contacts it is probably the sense of being really needed and wanted which gives us the greatest satisfaction and creates the most lasting bond.

The maxim of the British people is Business as usual.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God’s hand, his brain as God’s brain, his purpose as God’s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

I do not like work even when someone else does it.

Our tastes greatly alter. The lad does not care for the child’s rattle, and the old man does not care for the young man’s whore.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Perhaps man is the only being that can properly be called idle.

Tis a superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.