Quotes from George Eliot

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

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 ...

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.

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato's cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don't know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?

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

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

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.

There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.

Hell is oneself; Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

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

Coarse kindness is at least better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness.

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.

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

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

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

It is in those acts which we call trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

But certain winds will make men's temper bad.

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

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.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure