George Meredith

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

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

The well of true wit is truth itself.

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

A witty woman is a treasure; a witty beauty is a power.

In...the book of Egoism, it is written, possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

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.

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 …

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 …

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

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

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

The actors are, it seems, the usual three: Husband and wife and lover.

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

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 pay for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth.

Speech is the small change of Silence.

God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman!

Kissing don't last; cookery do!

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

Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.

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

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

The sea foamed like the mouth of madness, as the Genie sped thunder-like over it.