George Meredith Quotes

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

But O the truth, the truth. The many eyes That look on it The diverse things they see.

Prepare, You lovers, to know Love a thing of moods: Not like hard life, of laws.

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

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.

My religion of life is always to be cheerful.

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

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

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

The well of true wit is truth itself.

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

She poured a little social sewage into his ears.

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!

Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them.

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

Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

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

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

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.

Woman's reason is in the milk of her breasts.

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

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

We are betrayed by what is false within

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

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

The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

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

Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.

Caricature is rough truth.

The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.

Chance works for us when we are good captains.

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.

George Eliot has the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.

Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her wit: "an unusual combination," in the deliberate syllables of one of the writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of her.

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

I know him, February's thrush, And loud at eve he valentines On sprays that paw the naked bush Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

A house with a great wine stored below lives in our imagination as a joyful house, fast and splendidly rooted in the soil.

Speech is the small change of silence.

A woman who is not quite a fool will forgive your being but a man, if you are surely that. . .

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

Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.

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

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

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

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.