George Eliot

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they’re gone.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

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

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

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness – calling their denial knowledge.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

In his private heart no man much respects himself.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.

Some will always be above others. Destroy the inequality today, and it will appear again tomorrow.

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

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

There is a crack in everything God has made.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning Good morning at total strangers.

We are not what we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.

Virtue is too often merely local.

Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

The giving of love is an education in itself.