George Eliot

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

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

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Anger is short madness

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

Property is organized robbery.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Trust instinct to the end, even though you can give no reason.

Little minds have little worries, big minds have no time for worries.

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

If you develop rules, never have more than ten.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower.