George Eliot

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else… you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

There is a great deal of human nature in people.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

Believe that each day that shines on you is your last.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Books are delightful society. If you go into a room and find it full of books – even without taking them from the shelves they seem to speak to you, to bid you welcome.

The human race afraid of nothing, rushes on through every crime.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.

It is not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong; not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich; not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned; and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.