George Eliot

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

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

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

What we become depends on what our fathers teach us.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

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

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

Your dreams may have shattered, but that doesn’t mean they are over. They can still be turned into a mosaic of success.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.