George Meredith
A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.Collection: Power
Memoirs are the backstairs of history.Collection: History
Don't just count your years, make your years count.Collection: Birthday
Jealousy is love bed of burning snarl.Collection: Jealousy
The most dire disaster in love is the death of imagination.Collection: Imagination
Who rises from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul when hot for certainties in this our life!
Speech is the small change of silence.
I expect Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
Kissing don't last: cookery do!
Possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.
There is nothing the body suffers the soul may not profit by.
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.
Always imitate the behavior of the winners when you lose.
The well of true wit is truth itself.
Caricature is rough truth.
The man of science is nothing if not a poet gone wrong.
She poured a little social sewage into his ears.
Bring the army of the faithful through.
I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
The man or country that fights priestcraft and priests is to my mind striking deeper for freedom than can be struck anywhere.
Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.Collection: Death
There is nothing the body suffers which the soul may not profit by.Collection: Adversity
The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay.Collection: Debt
We are betrayed by what is false withinCollection: Being Yourself
God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!Collection: Blessing
Poetry is talking on tiptoe.Collection: Talking
We never know what's in us till we stand by ourselves.Collection: Knows
How many a thing which we cast to the ground, When others pick it up, becomes a gem!Collection: Casts
Always imitate the behaviour of the winners when you lose.Collection: Success
What a woman thinks of women is the test of her nature.Collection: Women
The man who has no mind of his own lends it to the priests.Collection: Men
Observation is the most enduring of the pleasures of life.Collection: Pleasure
Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.Collection: Heart
My religion of life is always to be cheerful.Collection: Cheerful
As we to the brutes, poets are to us.Collection: Poet
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.Collection: Spring
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.Collection: Perfect
Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.Collection: Love
Much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Valentine
Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Kissing
The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain from baptizing it.Collection: Born
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!Collection: Stars
Sentimentalists are they who seek to enjoy without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done.Collection: Done
But O the truth, the truth. The many eyes That look on it The diverse things they see.Collection: Eye
And if I drink oblivion of a day, / So shorten I the stature of my soul.Collection: Soul