George Meredith Quotes

Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.

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.

Kissing don't last: cookery do !

Chance works for us when we are good captains.

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

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

Poetry is talking on tiptoe.

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

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

Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

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

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

We never know what's in us till we stand by ourselves (George Meredith, ORF)

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

She poured a little social sewage into his ears.

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

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!

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

Speech is the small change of silence.

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

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

Days, when the ball of our vision
Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun;
When the grasp 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 then, they dwindle, they glimmer
As lights over mounds of the dead.
-Ode to Youth and Memory

just got back from a beautiful eve of winter solstice snowshoeing. my heart was lost and enlivened by both the hush of the mountainous snow world and a very fun irreverence with friends. i shared a solstice quote but did not share this one.

so in the spirit of the year--happy solistice! may there be ever present and growing light in your life as nature unfolds the same in the upcoming months.

"sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive leap off the rim of earth across the dome. it is a night to make the heavens our home. more than the nest whereto apace we strive. lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive, in swarms outrushing from the golden comb. they waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam: you throb in me, the dead revive. yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath, life glistens on the river of death. it folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt, or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs of radiance, the radiance enrings: and this is the soul's haven to have felt." --from _winter heavens_

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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!

Why mayn't they do what men do?' the Hero cried impetuously. 'I hate that contemptible narrow-mindedness. It's that that makes the ruin and horrors I see. Why mayn't they do what men do? I like the women who are brave enough not to be hypocrites. By Heaven! if these women are bad, I like them better than a set of hypocritical creatures who are all show, and deceive you in the end.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Heiresses are never jilted.

A dainty rogue in porcelain

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.

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

The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.

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

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

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

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.

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.

O have a care of natures that are mute!