George Eliot

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

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

How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice…

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Virtue is too often merely local.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.

We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.

Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

The advantage of doing one’s praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung.