Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

Cynicism, Meredith implies, isn’t a hard-earned wisdom so much as a costume choice. Calling it “intellectual dandyism” turns a supposedly tough-minded stance into a kind of salon fashion: an attitude carefully tailored to look superior, unbothered, unfooled. The dandy doesn’t just dress well; he performs detachment as social power. Meredith’s jab is that the cynic, too, is performing - curating disbelief as a badge of refinement.

The phrasing works because it flips the cynic’s self-image. Cynicism often claims moral seriousness (“I see through hypocrisy”), but “dandyism” suggests vanity and leisure, a person preoccupied with the aesthetics of being above it all. Meredith is diagnosing a temptation among the educated: when the world feels messy or disappointing, disdain can feel like control. If you preemptively sneer, you can’t be embarrassed by hope. The subtext is psychological: cynicism isn’t just a view of the world, it’s self-protection masquerading as intellect.

Meredith, writing in the late Victorian era, knew a culture saturated with social performance and class-coded manners. His novels dissect status, courtship, and moral posturing; this line belongs to that project. It’s less an argument against skepticism than against skepticism-as-style, the pose that treats earnestness as naive and commitment as uncool. Underneath the insult is a demand for courage: to risk believing, acting, and caring without the safety net of ironic distance.