George Meredith Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

George Meredith
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb's feathers.

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

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

George Meredith
Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,
I would speak my heart out heaven is my need.

George Meredith
The light of every soul burns upward. Of course, most of them are candles in the wind. Let us allow for atmospheric disturbance.

George Meredith
For him the woods were a home and gave him the key Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers. The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours.

George Meredith
The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.

George Meredith
Well, the flowers of the field are frail things. Pluck one, and you have in your hand the frailest of things. But reach through the charm of colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than does that poetry of your little flower.

George Meredith
Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting
Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along,
Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter
Chill as a dull face frowning on a song.
Ay, but shows the South-west a ripple-feathered bosom
Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend
Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset
Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.

George Meredith
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.

George Meredith
Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her wit: "an unusual combination," in the deliberate syllables of one of the writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of her.

George Meredith
Lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire.

George Meredith
Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.

George Meredith
Published memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end.

George Meredith
Prepare, You lovers, to know Love a thing of moods: Not like hard life, of laws.

George Meredith
I know him, February's thrush, And loud at eve he valentines On sprays that paw the naked bush Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

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

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

George Meredith
When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror...
Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
More love should I have, and much less care.

George Meredith
'Tis Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too.

George Meredith
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.

George Meredith
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.

George Meredith
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.

George Meredith
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.

George Meredith
Days, when the ball of our vision
Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun;
When the graps on the bow was decision,
And arrow and hand and eye were one;
When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer,
Came heaving for rapture ahead! -
Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmer
As lights over mounds of the dead.

George Meredith
On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend.

George Meredith
[Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dullness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness yet to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher.

George Meredith
It seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.

George Meredith
For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.

George Meredith