It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action and they will have it if they cannot find it.
~ George Eliot
Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?
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 makes life dreary is want of motive.
Time like money is measured by our needs.
The years seem to rush by now and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.
Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
There is nothing will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
Might could would-they are contemptible auxiliaries.
The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
We cannot help the way in which people speak of us . . .
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
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 only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
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.
Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.
In every parting there is an image of death.
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
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.
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
