George Eliot

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

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.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

It’s them as take advantage that get advantage I this world.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?

There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me-I always feel that they have not said enough.

If the fairest features of the landscape are to be named after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

In charity there is no excess.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

You affect your subconscious mind by verbal repetition.

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

Some people are stuck on who I was that who I am never even had a chance.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

The disciplined are free.

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth.