George Eliot

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

“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.”

“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.”

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