George Eliot

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

The reward of one’s duty is the power to fulfill another.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

Live your life, do your work, then take your hat.

The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied.

Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

I would rather have my ignorance than another man’s knowledge, because I have so much of it.

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

A man’s style is his mind’s voice. Wooden minds, wooden voices.

It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.

I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the school boys who educate my son.