Top 50 George Gissing Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time is money says the proverb, but turn it around and you get a precious truth. Money is time.”

— George Gissing

2. “Have the courage of your desire.”

— George Gissing

3. “For the man sound of body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every day has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.”

— George Gissing

4. “It is our duty never to speak ill of others, you know; least of all when we know that to do so will be the cause of much pain and trouble.”

— George Gissing

5. “That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.”

— George Gissing

6. “It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.”

— George Gissing

7. “Perhaps it is while drinking tea that I most of all enjoy the sense of leisure.”

— George Gissing

8. “Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with mocking laughter.”

— George Gissing

9. “To every man it is decreed: Thou shalt live alone. Happy they who imagine that they have escaped the common lot; happy, whilst they imagine it.”

— George Gissing

10. “I have the happiness of a passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?”

— George Gissing

11. “The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its compensation in ever-growing calm.”

— George Gissing

12. “Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice.”

— George Gissing

13. “Human creatures have a mervellous power of adapting themselves to necessity.”

— George Gissing

14. “The truths of life are not discovered by us. At moments unforeseen, some gracious influence descends upon the soul, touching it to an emotion which, we know not how, the mind transmutes into thought.”

— George Gissing

15. “A pipe for the hour of work; a cigarette for the hour of conception; a cigar for the hour of vacuity.”

— George Gissing

16. “For one thing, I know every book of mine by its scent.”

— George Gissing

17. “Honest winter, snow clad and with the frosted beard, I can welcome not uncordially; but that long deferment of the calendar’s promise, that weeping loom of March and April, that bitter blast outraging the honor of May – how often has it robbed me of heart and hope.”

— George Gissing

18. “The simple, sober truth has no chance whatever of being listened to, and it’s only by volume of shouting that the ear of the public is held. What.”

— George Gissing

19. “To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity.”

— George Gissing

20. “Poverty makes a crime of every indulgence.”

— George Gissing

21. “I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils haricots – those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certified aridites calling themselves human food!”

— George Gissing

22. “Parks are but pavement disguised with a growth of grass.”

— George Gissing

23. “Indolence had a great part in his temperament; a book, a sunny corner, and entire tranquillity, formed his ideal of supportable existence.”

— George Gissing

24. “Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable?”

— George Gissing

25. “He inspired no distrust; his good nature seemed all-pervading; he had the air of one who lavishes disinterested counsel, and ever so little exalts himself with his facile exuberance of speech. The Whirlpool.”

— George Gissing

26. “The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books.”

— George Gissing

27. “Poverty will make the best people bad, if it gets hard enough. Why there’s so much of it in the world, I’m sure I can’t see.”

— George Gissing

28. “Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self compassion.”

— George Gissing

29. “Money is made at Christmas out of holly and mistletoe, but who save the vendors would greatly care if no green branch were procurable? One symbol, indeed, has obscured all others – the minted round of metal. And one may safely say that, of all the ages since a coin first became the symbol of power, ours is that in which it yields to the majority of its possessors the poorest return in heart’s contentment.”

— George Gissing

30. “Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.”

— George Gissing

31. “Money is time. With money I buy for cheerful use the hours which otherwise would not in any sense be mine; nay, which would make me their miserable bondsman.”

— George Gissing

32. “And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world’s neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? Your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?”

— George Gissing

33. “Confound it! It’s just because nobody does anything that things have come to this pass!”

— George Gissing

34. “But we have no money. Suffer as we may, there’s no help for it – because we have no money. Lives may be wasted – worse, far worse than wasted – just because there is no money. At this moment a whole world of men and women is in pain and sorrow – because they have no money. How often have we said that? The world is made so; everything has to be bought with money.”

— George Gissing

35. “But the loneliness of her life had developed in her a sensitiveness which could not endure situations such as the present; difficulties which are of small account to people who take their part in active social life, harassed her to the destruction of all peace.”

— George Gissing

36. “I am much better employed from every point of view, when I live solely for my own satisfaction, than when I begin to worry about the world. The world frightens me, and a frightened man is no good for anything.”

— George Gissing

37. “People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads that one mustn’t write save at I the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business.”

— George Gissing

38. “She had dreamed her dream, and on awaking must be content to take up the day’s duties. Just in the same way, when she was a child at Mrs. Peckover’s, did not sleep often bring a vision of happiness, of freedom from bitter tasks, and had she not to wake in the miserable mornings, trembling lest she had lain too long? Her condition was greatly better than then, so much better that it seemed wicked folly to lament because one joy was not granted her. –.”

— George Gissing

39. “It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.”

— George Gissing

40. “London is a huge shop, with a hotel on the upper storeys.”

— George Gissing

41. “To be at other people’s orders brings out all the bad in me.”

— George Gissing

42. “No, no; women, old or young, should never have to think about money.”

— George Gissing

43. “The art of living is the art of compromise. We.”

— George Gissing

44. “Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders. In.”

— George Gissing

45. “Never had it occurred to Widdowson that a wife remains an individual, with rights and obligations independent of their wifely condition.”

— George Gissing

46. “For, work as you will, there is no chance of a new and better world until the old be utterly destroyed.”

— George Gissing

47. “To stab the root of a young tree, to hang crushing burdens upon it, to rend off its early branches – that is not the treatment likely to result in growth such as nature purposed. There will come of it a vicious formation, and the principle applies also to the youth of men.”

— George Gissing

48. “Since the publication of his first book he had avoided as far as possible all knowledge of what the critics had to say about him; his nervous temperament could not bear the agitation of reading these remarks, which, however inept, define an author and his work to so many people incapable of judging for themselves.”

— George Gissing

49. “Do you know anything about Arromanches? A very quiet little spot on the Normandy coast. You get to it by an hour’s coach from Bayeux. Not infested by English.”

— George Gissing

50. “My aim is to have easy command of all the pleasures desired by a cultivated man. I want to live among beautiful things, and never to be troubled by a thought of vulgar difficulties. I want to travel and enrich my mind in foreign countries. I want to associate on equal terms with refined and interesting people. I want to be known, to be familiarly referred to, to feel when I enter a room that people regard me with some curiosity.”

— George Gissing