George Eliot

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

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.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer –committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to be quite true.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.

The receipts of cookery are swelled to a volume; but a good stomach excels them all.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

All styles are good except the tiresome kind.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Beware what you set your heart upon. For it shall surely be yours.

So far as a person thinks; they are free.