George Meredith Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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.

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

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

George Meredith
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.

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

George Meredith
The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.

George Meredith
More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win.

George Meredith
Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.

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

George Meredith
We never know what's in us till we stand by ourselves (George Meredith, ORF)

George Meredith
A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave of a great flood that whirls me to the sea. But, as you will! we'll sit contentedly, and eat our pot of honey on the grave.

George Meredith
Into the breast that gives the rose,
Shall I with shuddering fall?

George Meredith
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.

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

George Meredith
Full lasting is the song, though he,
The singer, passes

George Meredith
A woman who is not quite a fool will forgive your being but a man, if you are surely that...

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

George Meredith
The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.

George Meredith
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life! -
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!

George Meredith
It's past parsons to console us:
No, nor no doctor fetch for me:
I can die without my bolus;
Two of a trade, lass, never agree!
Parson and Doctor!—don't they love rarely
Fighting the devil in other men's fields!
Stand up yourself and match him fairly:
Then see how the rascal yields!

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

George Meredith
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!

George Meredith
In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.

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

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

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

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

George Meredith