George Eliot

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

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand, the angels come to visit us and we only know them when they are gone.

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

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Adventure is not outside man, it is within.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul, unbelief in denying them.

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

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.

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

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

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.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

Blessed is the influence of one true loving human soul on another.

What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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

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

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.

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

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

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

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

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

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

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets on grounds other than personal liking.

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

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

We hand folks over to God's mercy and show none ourselves.

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

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.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives or else to be a monster.

Harold like the rest of us had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

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

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.

There is only one failure in life possible and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

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.

Is it not rather what we expect in men that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire, it is hardly a passion but a blight bred in the cloudy damp, despondency of uneasy egoism.

Consequences are unpitying.

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

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good and we must hunger after them.

You should read history and look at ostracism persecution martyrdom and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men you know.

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

In spite of his practical ability some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

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

All meanings we know depend on the key of interpretation.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity, rather the more our egoism is satisfied the more robust is our belief.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

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.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Falsehood is easy truth so difficult.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

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

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Cruelty like every other vice requires no motive outside of itself, it only requires opportunity.

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

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

Might could would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty, but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

No compliment can be eloquent except as an expression of indifference.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action choice resolved memory.

Rome - the city of visible history where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

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.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

But human experience is usually paradoxical that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

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

In every parting there is an image of death.

Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

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.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

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

Our words have wings but fly not where we would.

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

That's what a man wants in a wife mostly, he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.

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

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

I like not only to be loved but also to be told I am loved.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

For what is love itself for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Iteration like friction is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

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

I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The only failure one should fear is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

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

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

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love and desire to continue in and make no effort to escape from.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Great things are not done by impulse but by a series of small things brought together.

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

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

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

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

The happiest women like the happiest nations have no history.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

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

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

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

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

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Wear a smile and have friends, wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

To have in general but little feeling seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

It is easy to say how we love new friends and what we think of them but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder but a hatred of all injury.

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

We must not sit still and look for miracles, up and doing and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains through faith in Christ Jesus will do anything.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger else it must be pressed small like Chinese feet, her happiness is to be made as cakes are by a fixed recipe.