George Eliot

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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