George Eliot

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

“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.”

“The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.”

“There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.”

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

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

“But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.”

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

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

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

“In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.”

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

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

“Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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