George Eliot

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

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.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

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

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.