Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it. – 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. – George Eliot
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief. – George Eliot
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. – George Eliot
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. – George Eliot
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure. – George Eliot
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men. – George Eliot
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters. – George Eliot
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends? – George Eliot
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down. – George Eliot
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. – George Eliot
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment. – George Eliot
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know. – George Eliot
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. – George Eliot
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. – George Eliot
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities. – George Eliot
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart. – George Eliot