George Eliot

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

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.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and whittled them.

In heaven an angel is no one in particular.

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it’s what he descends to that shames the human race.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

You are perfect. An exquisitely fine work of art, labor of love, suspended in silence. Bejeweled, trembling, kissed by a breeze, mesmerized by your beauty. You await in silence, beckoning me to a silken-wrapped slumber.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.