George Eliot

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

The eye is easily frightened.

The two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

Wit makes its own welcome, and levels all distinctions. No dignity, no learning, no force of character, can make any stand against good wit.

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

The philosopher is Nature’s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have, to prove it right.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Ready are you? What know you of ready?

Nothing does reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it: For Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.