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.

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.

Don't just count your years, make your years count.

Speech is the small change of silence.

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

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

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

Kissing don't last: cookery do!

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

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

Always imitate the behaviour of the winners when you lose.

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

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

Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.

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

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

She poured a little social sewage into his ears.

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

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.

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

Heiresses are never jilted.

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

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!

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

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.

Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

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

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!

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

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

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.

Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.

The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.

My religion of life is always to be cheerful.

We never know what's in us till we stand by ourselves.

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.