George Eliot

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Consequences are unpitying.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

To know fulfillment, nourish what is for the belly and not the eye.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

Be ever on your guard what you say of anybody and to whom.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.