George Eliot

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg…

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.

O imitators, you slavish herd!

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

Nothing is real.

You sold me a dream and it shattered. I didn’t know how to put it back together again. So instead, I’m lovingly gluing those fragments anew with seams of gold, creating a vibrant new dream, rendering the broken strong and more than ever, breathtakingly beautiful.

What is once well done is done forever.

All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.

What fugitive from his country can also escape from himself.

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

Happiness is not a state to arrive at, rather, a manner of traveling.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.