George Eliot

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

We live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think we thus lose some respect for one another.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

There are no have-to’s, just choices.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

Not to be provok’d is best: But if mov’d, never correct till the Fume is spent; For every Stroke our Fury strikes, is sure to hit our selves at last.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.

A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.