George Eliot

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

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

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

If we don’t occupy ourself with everything, then peaceful mind will have nowhere to abide.

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

A hen is only a egg’s way of making another egg.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.