George Eliot

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

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

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.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

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.

Those who cross the sea change only the climate, not their character.

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

Our strength grows out of our weakness.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you?

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time

The public must and will be served.

Say what you have to say and first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending; sit down.

Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

Men have become the tools of their trade.

Genius Borrows nobly.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

When speculation has done its worst, two and two still make four.