George Eliot

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

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.

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I am who I am today because of the choices I made yesterday.

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune, and when you have it, it requires ten times as much skill to keep it.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time, you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened.

When you know better, you do better.

A man is related to all nature.

Lilac anemone, paper petals, turning tentatively to face a pale sun opening to reveal a lightness of being, a flash of gold, a fresh resilience, contented silence, the dawn of a new day.