George Eliot

“Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.”

“What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.”

“Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.”

“Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.”

“Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?”

“What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?”

“Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.”

“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, not its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.”

“O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude...”

“For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.”

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”

“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”

“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”

“There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all....”

“the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.”

“There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”

“there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.”

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”

“Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.”

“When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.”

“When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.”

“Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.”

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”

“Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!”

“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.”

“Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for the strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.”

“Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”

“She felt that she enjoyed it [horseback riding] in a pagan, sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.”

“Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.”

“One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.”

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”

“Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.”

“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.”

“I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.”

“I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.”

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

“Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.”

“I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour--or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.”

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”

“Animals are such agreeable friends―they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.”

“Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.”

“The limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognisable deed.”

“Hans: [Y]ou can't conceive what a great fellow I'm going to be. The seed of immortality has sprouted within me.Deronda: Only a fungoid growth, I daresay - a crowing disease in the lungs.”

“We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.”

“Those who trust us educate us.”

“It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.”

“I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.”

“three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.”

“The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.”