George Eliot

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

“The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.”

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

“But the vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in this - that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him. [from Middlemarch, a quote my mother thinks describes the kind of man my father was]”

“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.”

“Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty—it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it... There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.”

“If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”

“I flutter all ways, and fly in none.”

“We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves”

“There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.”

“I shall do everything it becomes me to do.”

“What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!”

“To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.”

“Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.”

“No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience.”

“You know I have duties──we both have duties──before which feeling must be sacrificed.”

“We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.”

“A man conscious of enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds, and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.”

“But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.”

“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

“She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”

“I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.”

“Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.”

“But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.”

“To many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a particular influence, subduing them into receptiveness.”

“Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life”

“It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.”

“In every parting there is an image of death.”

“I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.”

“I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”

“I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.”

“I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved.”

“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.”

“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

“I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

“Everything is all one - that is the beginning and end with you.”

“A map was a fine thing to study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.”

“There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.”

“The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.”

“She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving - perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”

“The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

“If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”

“Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?”

“It's well known there's always two sides, if no more.”

“Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a lover? The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.”

“Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.”

“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”

“There are episodes in most men's lives in which their highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill their inward version.”