George Eliot

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

At the end of my life, with just one breath left, if you come, I’ll sit up and sing.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

Your most precious, valued possessions and your greatest powers are invisible and intangible. No one can take them. You, and you alone, can give them. You will receive abundance for your giving.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air; can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun; can carry whatever loads a ton of coal can lift; can knock down cities with his fist of gunpowder; can recover the history of his race by the medals which the deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, has involuntarily dropped of its existence; and divine the future possibility of the planet and its inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature.

Today is a king in disguise.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Glances of true beauty can be seen in the faces of those who live in true meekness.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

You must not blame me if I do talk to the clouds.