George meredith quotes

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

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

Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.

The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.

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

Behold the life at ease; it drifts, The sharpened life commands its course.

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!

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.

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

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!

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

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

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

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

Days, when the ball of our vision Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun; When the graps on the bow was decision, And arrow and hand and eye were one; When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer, Came heaving for rapture ahead! - Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmer As lights over mounds of the dead.

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.

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

Caricature is rough truth.

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

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

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Chance works for us when we are good captains.

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

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.

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

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.

Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, I would speak my heart out heaven is my need.

How many a thing which we cast to the ground, When others pick it up, becomes a gem!

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.

Always imitate the behaviour of the winners when you lose.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

My religion of life is always to be cheerful.

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.

I've studied men from my topsy-turvy Close, and I reckon, rather true. Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy; Most, a dash between the two.

As we to the brutes, poets are to us.

We know the degree of refinement in people by the matter they laugh at and the ring of the laugh.

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

Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.

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

Heiresses are never jilted.

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

Speech is the small change of silence.

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

Earth, the mother of all, Moves on her stedfast way, Gathering, flinging, sowing. Mortals, we live in her day, She in her children is growing.

The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice.

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

It's past parsons to console us: No, nor no doctor fetch for me: I can die without my bolus; Two of a trade, lass, never agree! Parson and Doctor!--don't they love rarely Fighting the devil in other men's fields! Stand up yourself and match him fairly: Then see how the rascal yields!

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

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.

For singing till his heaven fills, 'Tis love of earth that he instills, And ever winging up and up, Our valley is his golden cup, And he the wine which over flows To lift us with him as he goes.

Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

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

Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.

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

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.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

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

Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.

She poured a little social sewage into his ears.

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

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

Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

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

Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.

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!

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.

O have a care of natures that are mute!

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

Kissing don't last: cookery do!

We are betrayed by what is false within

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