George Eliot

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

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.

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

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Today, you can decide to walk in freedom. You can choose to walk differently. You can walk as a free person, enjoying every step.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

You. Not wanting me. Was the beginning of me wanting myself. Thank you.

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

What a new face courage puts on everything!

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

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

I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relationship is a new word.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.