George Eliot

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

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.

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

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.

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.

A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!

The only prudence in life is concentration.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

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

Men have become the tools of their trade.

Truth is a naked and open daylight.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

How many attractions for us have our passing fellows in the streets, both male and female, which our ethics forbid us to express, which yet infuse so much pleasure into life. A lovely child, a handsome youth, a beautiful girl, a heroic man, a maternal woman, a venerable old man, charm us, though strangers, and we cannot say so, or look at them but for a moment.