George Eliot

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.

Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

It is better to be frightened now than killed hereafter

An index is a great leveller.

Dare to think for yourself.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule to never criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand — relax!

Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.