George Eliot

“When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”

“The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.”

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

“Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.”

“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”

“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.”

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

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

“When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.”

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

“What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?”

“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.”

“You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.”

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

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

“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.”

“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.”

“There are many victories worse than a defeat.”

“There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.”

“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.”