Quotes from George Eliot

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly

It is never too late to be what we might have been.

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life- to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories ...

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

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.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

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

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