George Eliot

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

I have been brought up and trained to have the utmost contempt for people who get drunk.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

I heartily accept the motto,That government is best which governs least; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe,That government is best which governs not at all; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised.

Sad people dislike the happy, and the happy the sad; the quick thinking the sedate, and the careless the busy and industrious.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Nothing is more common than mutual dislike, where mutual approbation is particularly expected.

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.