George Eliot

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage – the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

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.

Blows are sarcasm’s turned stupid.

No just cause is futile, even if it’s lost, if it helps make the future better than the past.

It is proved…that things cannot be other than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose, it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

To hazard much to get much has more of avarice than wisdom.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

The greatest meliorator of the world is selfish, huckstering Trade.

The future is purchased by the present.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.