George Eliot

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.

There’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himself, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him. There’d be two ’pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings and resolves are the last of their kind.

Half the sorrows of women would be kverted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless—nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

A woman’s hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Friendships begin with liking 0£ gratitude—roots that can be pulled up.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

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

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.

It’s them as take advantage that get advantage in this world.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

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

What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will.

Some people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

Childhood has no forebodings, but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

But pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.