George Eliot

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

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 recipe.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Sympathetic people often don’t communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Be ever on your guard what you say of anybody and to whom.

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.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

The newspaper that obstructs the law on a trivial pretext, for money’s sake, is a dangerous enemy to the public weal.That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times. You don’t mind the times … You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don’t think foolishly.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Be yourself. Follow your instincts. Success depends, at least in part, on the ability to carry it off.