George Eliot

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it.

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

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

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

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts, not to hurt others.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Its a fathers duty to give his sons a fine chance.

How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!

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

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

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.

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

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

You are lonely I love you I want you to consent to be my wife I will wait but I want you to promise that you will marry me no one else.

Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly.

One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.

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

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

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

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

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

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

Appearances have very little to do with happiness.

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

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

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

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 soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

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

Net the large fish and you are sure to have the small fry.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.

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.

These gems have life in them their colors speak say what words fail of.

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

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

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

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Consequences are unpitying.

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

The worst of all hobbies are those that people think they can get money at. They shoot their money down like corn out of a sack then.

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

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

Theres truth in wine and there may be some in gin and muddy beer but whether its truth worth my knowing is another question.

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

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

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

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet.

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

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

The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant ...

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

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

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco pipes of those who diffuse it it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

Conscience is harder than our enemies knows more accuses with more nicety.

It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

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

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

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

He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.

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

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.

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.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far The voice divine of human loyalty.

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

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

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