George Meredith Quotes

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.

In...the book of Egoism, it is written, possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

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.

The actors are, it seems, the usual three:
Husband and wife and lover.

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

What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
And all that draweth on the tomb for text.
Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:
Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.
We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
Intelligence and instinct now are one.
But nature says: 'My children most they seem
When they least know me: therefore I decree
That they shall suffer.' Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
Then if we study Nature we are wise.

With patient inattention hear him prate.

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

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.

Kissing don't last; cookery do!

See ye not, Courtesy
Is the true Alchemy,
Turning to gold all it touches and tries?

"How divine is utterance!" she said. "As we to the brutes, poets are to us."

There is nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by.

The well of true wit is truth itself.

I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.