George Eliot

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.

People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Avoid popularity it has many snares and no real benefit.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

The purity men love is like the mists which envelope the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake . . . by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.