George Eliot

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

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

Being is the great explainer.

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.

Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

Human ‘beans’ is the only animals that is killing their own kind.

Surrender is faith that the power of love can accomplish anything… even when you can not foresee the outcome.

It is easy – terribly easy – to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

Rest in reason; move in passion.

Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.

Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.