George Eliot

He was like the cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the "dear deceit" of beauty.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.

"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.