George Eliot

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

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

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

The only sin that we never forgive in each other is a difference in opinion.

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Love is only one of many passions.

There is but one step from the Academy to the Fad.

The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature’s English comfort.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.