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.

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.

But O the truth, the truth! the many eyes
That look on it! the diverse things they see!

What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature.

With patient inattention hear him prate.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

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

Civil limitation daunts
His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he.

First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill.

The well of true wit is truth itself.

Cannon his name,
Cannon his voice, he came.

Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too.

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

God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!

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.