George Gissing Quotes

Hear-break is a very old-fashioned disorder, associated with poverty of the brain.

It is our duty never to speak ill of others, you know; least of all when we know that to do so will be the cause of much pain and trouble.

Oftener than not, she still thought of Peak as he appeared some eleven years ago — an evident plebeian, without manners, without a redeeming grace.

Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders.

Genuine respect for law is the result of possessing something which the law exerts itself to guard. Should it happen that you possess nothing, and that your education in metaphysics has been grievously neglected, the strong probability is that your mind will reduce the principle of society to its naked formula: Get, by whatever means, so long as with impunity.

Un ideale spinto all'estremo non è poi tanto meglio dell'assenza di ideali.

Time is money — says the vulgarest saw known to any age or people. Turn it round about, and you get a precious truth — money is time. [...] What are we doing all our lives but purchasing, or trying to purchase, time? And most of us, having grasped it with one hand, throw it away with the other.

Pure literature seemed beyond his scope, yet he was constantly endeavouring to express himself.

It was always in your power to rule me. What pained me worst, and hardened me against you, was that I saw you didn’t care to exert your influence. There was never a time when I could have resisted a word of yours spoken out of your love for me. But even then, I am afraid, you no longer loved me, and now — —

But we have no money. Suffer as we may, there's no help for it — because we have no money. Lives may be wasted — worse, far worse than wasted — just because there is no money. At this moment a whole world of men and women is in pain and sorrow — because they have no money. How often have we said that? The world is made so; everything has to be bought with money.

exchanged looks, and laughed together.

What I hoped was to raise up for the poor and the untaught a friend out of their own midst, some one who had gone through all that they suffer, who was accustomed to earn her own living by the work of her hands as they do, who had never thought herself their better, who saw the world as they see it and knew all their wants. A lady may do good, we know that; but she can’t be the friend of the poor as I understand it; there’s too great a distance between her world and theirs.

To his mind there was something unnatural in a union between Egremont and Thyrza; try as he would, he could not realise it as having come to pass. The two were parted by so vast a social distinction, and, let Nature say what it will, the artificialities of life are wont to prevail.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.