George Eliot

Those who trust us educate us.

I cannot imagine myself without some opinion, but I wish to have good reasons for them.

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

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

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.