George Eliot

“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.”

“Fate has carried me'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand--Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breastTo pierce another.”

“If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.”

“Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”

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

“Yes, the house must be inhabited, and we will see by whom; for imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.”

“The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.”

“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”

“Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.”

“The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.”

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

“In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Mrs. Bulstrode's naïve way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask...”

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

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