George Eliot

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

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

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

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct – nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

Don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.