“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”

— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)

About George Eliot

1819 – 1880

English novelist, author of "Middlemarch" and "Daniel Deronda".

“The reward of one duty is the power to fulfil another.”

“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.”

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.”

“I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart, and be the nobility of this land.”

“I cannot recall those years without horror, loathing, and heart-rending pain.”

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

“Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.”

“I believe that the normal human heart is born good.”

“Love, passionate young Love, how sweet it is / To have the bosom made a Paradise / By thee—life lighted by thy rainbow smile!”