George Eliot

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

That strong mother doesn’t tell her cub ‘Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you’. She says, ‘Toughen up, this is reality we are living in’.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Life consists in what a person is thinking of all day.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.

Sense shines with a double luster when it is set in humility. An able yet humble man is a jewel worth a kingdom.

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.

In the end, people will judge you anyway, so don’t live our life impressing other – live your life impressing yourself.

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

Wherever there is power there is age.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.