George Eliot

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

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.

That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men – that is genius.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

Only trust thyself, and another shall not betray thee.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

Wear none of thine own Chains; but keep free, whilst thou art free.

From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one – to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

He who praises every body, praises nobody.

Learn to say “I don’t know.” If used when appropriate, it will be often.