George Eliot

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

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

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.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

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

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Sir, he throws away his money without thought and without merit. I do not call a tree generous that sheds its fruit at every breeze.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; …they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; …those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It comes at last-the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them-and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, …a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

A friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. The friend asks no return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.