Latest Quotes

“You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)

“One can begin so many things with a new person! Even begin to be a better man.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)

“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 at the moment of the last parting?”

— George Eliot, Adam Bede (Penguin Classics)

“Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.”

— George Eliot, Adam Bede (Penguin Classics)

“Some people are nobody's enemies but their own.”

— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Dover Thrift Editions)

“A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.”

— Charles Dickens, Major Works of Charles Dickens (Great Expectations / Hard Times / Oliver Twist / A Christmas Carol / Bleak House / A Tale of Two Cities)

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”

— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Dover Thrift Editions)

“Our scars make us know that our past was for real.”

— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Dover Thrift Editions)

“He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.”

— Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics)

“We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence.”

— H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (Dover Thrift Editions)

“I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Dover Thrift Editions)

“At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearran…”

— Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (2 Volumes)

“To a great mind, nothing is little.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (2 Volumes)

“Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (2 Volumes)

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

— Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (2 Volumes)

“A girl in love will do a good deal.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Penguin Classics)

“As she realized what might have been, she grew to be thankful for what was.”

— Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies.”

— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (Dover Thrift Editions)