George Eliot

Ignorance… is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

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

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

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

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct – nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

It is wonderful when a calculation is made, how little the mind is actually employed in the discharge of any profession.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?

Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.

I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.

A man is a god in ruins.