George Eliot

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

It’s them as take advantage that get advantage I this world.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it cannot be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

The amount of people in this world who are here to do something great far outweighs the rest.

Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

When things are steep, remember to stay level-headed.

Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they find?

One definition of man is an intelligence served by organs.

As you get older, you realize that no one has all the answers. It turns out that life is an exercise in living with the certainty of uncertainty. – Jason Kilar

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.