George Meredith Quotes

Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

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

Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.

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.

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

The well of true wit is truth itself.

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 pay for it full worth:
We have it only when we are half earth.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

I've studied men from my topsy-turvy Close, and I reckon, rather true.
Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy;
Most, a dash between the two.

And if I drink oblivion of a day,
So shorten I the stature of my soul.

Speech is the small change of Silence.

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

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.

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

How many a thing which we cast to the ground,
When others pick it up, becomes a gem!