George Meredith Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.

That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!

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

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

We know the degree of refinement in people by the matter they laugh at and the ring of the laugh.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done.

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

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.

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

The well of true wit is truth itself.

Woman's reason is in the milk of her breasts.

Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

What a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!