Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

Meredith turns a romantic cliché inside out with the brisk snap of a proverb. “Kissing don’t last” arrives almost comic in its bluntness, the dropped “g” making it feel like hard-earned vernacular rather than salon wisdom. Then comes the punchline: “cookery do!” Not “cooking lasts,” but “cookery” - a slightly formal, even fussy word that signals domestic practice, routine, skill. The grammar is intentionally off-kilter; the effect is to make the sentiment sound like something overheard, not authored, which is exactly how cultural common sense reproduces itself.

The intent isn’t simply to dunk on romance. It’s to shift the conversation from courtship to maintenance, from the flash of desire to the infrastructure that keeps a household running. Meredith is writing in a Victorian world where marriage is as much an economic and social arrangement as an emotional one, and where women’s labor is both omnipresent and taken for granted. The line flatters practicality while quietly enforcing a gendered bargain: affection is transient; competence in the domestic sphere is the real currency.

Subtext: love is improv, dinner is logistics. The wit is that it sounds like a love-killer, yet it’s also a sly acknowledgment of what actually endures in long relationships - not constant heat, but repeated care. Meredith’s cynicism isn’t nihilistic; it’s managerial. He’s less interested in romance’s poetry than in the unglamorous, daily systems that decide whether intimacy survives the week.