The season of love is the carnival of egoism and it brings a touchstone to our natures.
— George Meredith
The most colorful George Meredith quotes that will inspire your inner self
Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.
Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.
Caricature is rough truth.
Lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.
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.
We are betrayed by what is false within
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
Speech is the small change of silence.
Kissing don't last: cookery do!
Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
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!
I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.
She poured a little social sewage into his ears.
Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.
Full lasting is the song, though he, / The singer, passes.
The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.
That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!
Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done.
God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!
And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my soul.
The man or country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere.
Heiresses are never jilted.
In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.
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.
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.
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.
See ye not, Courtesy is the true Alchemy, turning to gold all it touches and tries?
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer, Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!
Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.
The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.
Poetry is talking on tiptoe.
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!
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!
We who have seen Italia in the throes,Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now,Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough,All bounteous as she is fair, we think of thoseWho blew the breath of life into her frame:Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three:Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her freeFrom ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim.
Memoirs are the backstairs of history.
Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.
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.
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.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.
The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.
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!
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.
But O the truth, the truth. The many eyes That look on it The diverse things they see.
How many a thing which we cast to the ground, When others pick it up, becomes a gem!
George Eliot has the heart of Sappho;
but the face, with the long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.
The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.