George Eliot

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose. . . .

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.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

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.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.