George Eliot

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

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?

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly. The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.

We are wiser than we know.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.

The desire of gold is not for gold. It is for the means of freedom and benefit.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large mattertis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

The ocean is a wilderness reaching round the globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

Don’t call a woman a bitch. Call her an ass-hole. It still gets your point across and it’s not sexist.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.