George Eliot

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never.

The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

A physician’s physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric’s divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

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.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

Grow old along with me; the best is yet to be.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.