Top 70 George Meredith Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A human act once set in motion flows on forever to the great account. Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are.”

— George Meredith

2. “Speech is the small change of silence.”

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

4. “We are betrayed by what is false within.”

— George Meredith

5. “Memoirs are the backstairs of history.”

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

7. “The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.”

— George Meredith

8. “Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.”

— George Meredith

9. “Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them.”

— George Meredith

10. “But O the truth, the truth. The many eyes That look on it The diverse things they see.”

— George Meredith

11. “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

12. “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 paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!”

— George Meredith

13. “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

14. “Caricature is rough truth.”

— George Meredith

15. “My religion of life is always to be cheerful.”

— George Meredith

16. “Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.”

— George Meredith

17. “God’s rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!”

— George Meredith

18. “A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.”

— George Meredith

19. “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

20. “Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars.”

— George Meredith

21. “Kissing don’t last: cookery do!”

— George Meredith

22. “Always imitate the behavior of the winners when you lose.”

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

24. “Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.”

— George Meredith

25. “Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.”

— George Meredith

26. “The season of love is the carnival of egoism and it brings a touchstone to our natures.”

— George Meredith

27. “Much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.”

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

31. “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

32. “Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.”

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

34. “There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by.”

— George Meredith

35. “The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego – ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.”

— George Meredith

36. “The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.”

— George Meredith

37. “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

38. “Poetry is talking on tiptoe.”

— George Meredith

39. “The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.”

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

42. “The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.”

— George Meredith

43. “What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature.”

— George Meredith

44. “Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.”

— George Meredith

45. “Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.”

— George Meredith

46. “That rarest gift to Beauty, Common Sense!”

— George Meredith

47. “A house with a great wine stored below lives in our imagination as a joyful house, fast and splendidly rooted in the soil.”

— George Meredith

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

— George Meredith

49. “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

50. “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