George Eliot

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds – not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but – a hatred of all injury.

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.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

If there is something to gain and nothing to lose by asking, by all means ask!

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

When a man is just and firm in his purpose, the citizens burning to approve a wrong or the frowning looks of a tyrant. Do not shake his fixed mind, nor the Southwind. Wild lord of the uneasy Adriatic, nor the thunder in the mighty hand of Jove: Should the heavens crack and tumble down, as the ruins crushed him he would not fear.

We aim above the mark to hit the mark.

The listlessness of it all, the profit off depression, the extinction of an entire species, the chlorinated connections- poisoned just to appear clean.