George Eliot

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Teach love, for that is what you are.

There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.

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.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .

It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found - in loving obedience.

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

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.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.

Our thoughts are often worse than we are.

There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.