George Eliot

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they’re gone.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.

Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.

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

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.