I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.

There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.

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

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