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.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

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

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.

Consequences are unpitying.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Virtue is too often merely local.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.

Where God does not govern, tyrants will rule.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

I see the whole concept of Generation X implies that everyone has lost hope.

Meeting Franklin Roosevelt was like opening your first bottle of champagne; knowing him was like drinking it.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men’s hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius’s violins without Antonio.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.