Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.

— George Eliot

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.

— George Eliot

A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation.

— George Eliot

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

— George Eliot

A really cultured woman, like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right estimate of herself. She neither spouts' poetry nor quotes Cicero on slight provocation; not because she thinks that a sacrifice must be made to the prejudices of men, but because that mode of exhibiting her memory and Salinity does not present itself to her as edifying or graceful

— George Eliot

Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you, and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own.

— George Eliot

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterward.

— George Eliot

A woman may get to love by degrees—the best fire does not flare up the soonest.

— George Eliot

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams a shadow annihilates them.

— George Eliot

Aye, aye, that's the way WI' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's

— George Eliot