George Eliot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

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

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

In every parting there is an image of death.

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?

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

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

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.

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

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

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

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