George Meredith famous quotes

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

#Devil

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

#Garden #Smell #Decay

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.
-- George Meredith

#Beauty #Witty #Treasure

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

#Soul #Suffering #Body

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

#Prayer #Men #Answered Prayers

Caricature is rough truth.
-- George Meredith

#Art #Artist #Rough

We are betrayed by what is false within
-- George Meredith

#Being Yourself #Being Single #Betrayed

Speech is the small change of silence.
-- George Meredith

#Silence #Speech

The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.
-- George Meredith

#Debt #Pay #Hardest

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

#War #Ego #Patriotism

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

#Prayer #Heart #Heaven

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

#Love #Law #Hard Life

The well of true wit is truth itself.
-- George Meredith

#Thinking #Wit #Wells

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

#Soul #Hot #Answers

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.
-- George Meredith

#Valentine #Naked #Thorns

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.
-- George Meredith

#Stars #Sunset #Night

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.
-- George Meredith

#Men #Two #Topsy Turvy

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

#Flower #Broken #Necks

Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.
-- George Meredith

#Pleasure #Endure #Observation

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.
-- George Meredith

#Stars #Tired #Dark

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

#Women #Milk #Reason

Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.
-- George Meredith

#Duty #Felicity #Possession

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.
-- George Meredith

#Song #Laughter #Sunset

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

#Love #Dream #Young Love

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

#Life #Ease #Command

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

#Song #Singers #Immortality

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

#Soul #Oblivion #Drink

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

#Pain #Order #May

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

#Women #Thinking #Tests

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

#Eye #Looks #Diverse

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.
-- George Meredith

#Prayer #Passion #Soul

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

#Casts #Gems

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

#Laughter #People #Laughing

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

#Men #Poetry #Gone

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

#Country #Fighting #Men

My religion of life is always to be cheerful.
-- George Meredith

#Cheerful #Life Is

Always imitate the behavior of the winners when you lose.
-- George Meredith

#Success #Sports #Running

Chance works for us when we are good captains.
-- George Meredith

#Captains #Chance

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

#Love Is #Imagination #Disaster

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 Meredith

#Prayer #Memorial #Forever

Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
-- George Meredith

#Perfect #Simplicity #Wit

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 Meredith

#Knowledge #Blow #Men

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

#Stars #Night #Fire

She poured a little social sewage into his ears.
-- George Meredith

#Gossip #Ears #Littles

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.
-- George Meredith

#Kissing #Sea #Honey

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!
-- George Meredith

#Stars #Fire #Age

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

Kissing don't last: cookery do!
-- George Meredith

#Food #Kissing #Cooking

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

#Love #Carnivals #Egoism

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

#Women #Men #Lasts

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.
-- George Meredith

#Wine #Heaven #Singing

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.
-- George Meredith

#Eye #Light #Eagles

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

#Love #Winning #Conquer

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

#Curiosity #Trying #Gold

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

#Blessing #Good Woman

As we to the brutes, poets are to us.
-- George Meredith

#Poet #Brutes

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

#Men #Forgiving #Fool

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
-- George Meredith

#Intellectual #Cynicism #Dandyism

Heiresses are never jilted.
-- George Meredith

#Marriage #Jilted #Heiress

Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.
-- George Meredith

#Love #Love Is #Bed

Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them.
-- George Meredith

#Miracle

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
-- George Meredith

#History #Memoir

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!
-- George Meredith

#Beauty #Common Sense #Common

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.
-- George Meredith

#Book #Diaries #Her Beauty

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

#Done #Enjoy #Incurring

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

#Men #Mind #Atheism

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.
-- George Meredith

#Christian #Boys #Atheism

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.
-- George Meredith

#Song #Voice #Giving

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.
-- George Meredith

#Mother #Children #Moving

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

#Men #Literature #Ends

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.
-- George Meredith

#Sweet #Rawness #Comedy

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!
-- George Meredith

#Horse #Moving #Ocean

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

#Passion #Plot #Needs

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

#Water #Earth #Golden

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.
-- George Meredith

#Spring #Valleys #Forget

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

#Army #Law #Track

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!
-- George Meredith

#Fighting #Men #Past

O have a care of natures that are mute!
-- George Meredith

#Care #Mute

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.
-- George Meredith

#Struggle #Men #Reflection