George Eliot

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

My finger can point to the moon, but my finger is not the moon. You don’t have to become my finger, nor do you have to worship my finger. You have to forget my finger, and look at where it is pointing.

People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.

Do what good thou canst unknown, and be not vain of what ought rather to be felt than seen.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

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

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.