George Eliot

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down…

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness…

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

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty…

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable…

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end…

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

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be…

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult…

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause…

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

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent…

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past…

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must…

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