George Eliot

For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Always do what you are afraid to do.

In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

This is the comfort of the godly: the grave cannot hold them, and they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than turning us over from time to eternity.

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

Those who would mend the world must first mend themselves.

If people misunderstand you, do not worry…it is your voice that they hear, but what goes through their mind is…their own thoughts.

In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.

Only trust theyself, and another shall noet betray thee