Top 15 George Gissing Quotes

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.

The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books.

It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.

Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter.

Poverty makes a crime of every indulgence.

It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience . . .

A womanly occupation means, practically, an occupation that a man disdains.

Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion.

That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be
generous.

Nowhere is the English genius of domesticity more notably evident than in the festival of afternoon tea. The [...] chink of cups and the saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.

Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice.

Honest Winter, snow-clad, and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; But that long deferment of the calendar's promise, that weeping gloom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honour of May how often has it robbed me of heart and hope?

For the man sound in body and serene in mind there is no such thing as bad weather, every day has its beauty and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.

Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others — the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart's contentment.

How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.