George Eliot

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.

When one wanted one’s interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people’s tricks.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

Tread softly, Breathe peacefully, Laugh hysterically.

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.

Every wall is a door.

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower.

Find people who will make you better.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.

Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering.