George Eliot

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

So many fail because they don’t get started – they don’t go. They don’t overcome inertia. They don’t begin.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

Turn on the prudent ant thy heedful eyes. Observe her labors, sluggard, and be wise.

Every time I think I have reached the peak, I look up and see I still have a ways to go. But I look back and see just how far I have come.

Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge

There are goods so opposed that we cannot seize both, but, by too much prudence, may pass between them at too great a distance to reach either.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Logic is a poor guide compared with custom.