George Eliot

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles. . . but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief - a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

To manage men, one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.