George Eliot

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

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.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.

Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.

Much may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.

Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.