George Eliot

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

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.

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we’re so fond of it.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

We’re so infatuated with studying labels that we forget to read between the lines of one another.

Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

Events tend to recur in cycles…

You are braver than you believe. Stronger than you seem. And smarter than you think.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

A shoe that is too large is apt to trip one, and when too small, to pinch the feet. So it is with those whose fortune does not suit them.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.