George Eliot

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

There is a wisdom in this beyond the rules of physic: a man’s own observation what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of is the best physic to preserve health.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

I was born upon thy bank, river, my blood flows in thy stream, and thou meanderest forever. At the bottom of my dream.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Avoid popularity it has many snares and no real benefit.

What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?

The search after the great men is the dream of youth, and the most serious occupation of manhood.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put.