George Eliot

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

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.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within and available to you now.

It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.