George Meredith Quotes

The season of love is the carnival of egoism and it brings a touchstone to our natures.

Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.

She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by.

Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.

Caricature is rough truth.

Lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.

We are betrayed by what is false within

Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.

The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.

I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.

Speech is the small change of silence.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

Kissing don't last: cookery do!

Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.

Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.

Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars.

The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.

Always imitate the behaviour of the winners when you lose.

Full lasting is the song, though he, / The singer, passes.

What a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!

Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done.

Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.

She poured a little social sewage into his ears.

Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along, Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter Chill as a dull face frowning on a song. Ay, but shows the South-west a ripple-feathered bosom Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.

God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!

Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!

And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my soul.

See ye not, Courtesy is the true Alchemy, turning to gold all it touches and tries?

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!

A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave of a great flood that whirls me to the sea. But, as you will! we'll sit contentedly, and eat our pot of honey on the grave.

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose, Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend . . . He reached a middle height, and at the stars, Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

Much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.

The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.

Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

As we to the brutes, poets are to us.

In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.

Heiresses are never jilted.

The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.

A human act once set in motion flows on forever to the great account. Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are.

She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!

The man or country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere.

The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.

What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature.

Cultivated men and women who do not skim the cream of life, and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make acute and balanced observers.

It is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life! - In tragic hints here see what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.