George Eliot

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

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 finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.’ I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl’s life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her… I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Opening amenities are often opening inanities.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

A hen is only a egg’s way of making another egg.

Defeat in itself was part and parcel of the great gambling game of politics. A man who could not accept it and try again was not of the stuff of which leaders are made.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within and available to you now.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly tends to convert itself into power.

We bust build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.