George Meredith quotes:

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Kissing don't last: cookery do!
In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.
Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.
Speech is the small change of silence.
Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.
George Eliot has the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.
Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done.
The man or country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere.
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!
She poured a little social sewage into his ears.
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.
Caricature is rough truth.
Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.
Lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.
Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.
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!
Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Heiresses are never jilted.
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.
The season of love is the carnival of egoism and it brings a touchstone to our natures.
Don't just count your years, make your years count.
A house with a great wine stored below lives in our imagination as a joyful house, fast and splendidly rooted in the soil.
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!
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.
Much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.
I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
Always imitate the behavior of the winners when you lose.
Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
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.
A woman who is not quite a fool will forgive your being but a man, if you are surely that. . .
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!
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.
And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my soul.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.
As we to the brutes, poets are to us.
Behold the life at ease; it drifts, The sharpened life commands its course.
But O the truth, the truth. The many eyes That look on it The diverse things they see.
Chance works for us when we are good captains.
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.
Could I find a place to be alone with heaven, I would speak my heart out heaven is my need.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them.
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.
Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.
Full lasting is the song, though he, / The singer, passes.
God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!
How many a thing which we cast to the ground, When others pick it up, becomes a gem!
I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
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.
It is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him
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!
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.
My religion of life is always to be cheerful.
O have a care of natures that are mute!
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.
Poetry is talking on tiptoe.
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.
Prepare, You lovers, to know Love a thing of moods: Not like hard life, of laws.
Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.
See ye not, Courtesy is the true Alchemy, turning to gold all it touches and tries?
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.
Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!
The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.
The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.
The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.
The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.
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.
The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.
The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.
The well of true wit is truth itself.
There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by.
We are betrayed by what is false within
We know the degree of refinement in people by the matter they laugh at and the ring of the laugh.
We never know what's in us till we stand by ourselves" (George Meredith, ORF)
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.
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.
The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.
Woman's reason is in the milk of her breasts.

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