George Eliot

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

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

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

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Friends are true Twins in Soul; they Sympathize in every thing, and have the Love and Aversion. One is not happy without the other, nor can either of them be miserable alone. As if they could change Bodies, they take their turns in Pain as well as in Pleasure; relieving one another in their most adverse Conditions.What one enjoys, the other cannot Want. Like the Primitive Christians, they have all things in common, and no Property but in one another.

My reputation grows with every failure.

PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

An index is a great leveller.

Nay, Madam, when you are declaiming, declaim; and when you are calculating, calculate.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.