George Eliot

“For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.”

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

“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”

“In every parting there is an image of death.”

“Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.”

“Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?”

“In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.”

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”

“Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.”

“There are many victories worse than a defeat.”

“The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.”

“I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.”

“I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.”

“We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.”

“The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.”

“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.”

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”

“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”

“When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.”

“No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.”

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”

“A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.”

“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.”

“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”