Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

Meredith’s line is a quiet insult disguised as elegance: speech, for all its pride, is just petty cash broken from the richer currency of silence. Calling it “small change” demotes language from the grand, meaning-making force Victorians loved to celebrate into something transactional and slightly grubby - the coins you jingle to get through the day. The wit is in the reversal. We assume silence is absence and speech is presence; Meredith suggests the opposite: silence is the full account, speech the loose coins you can afford to spend.

The intent feels aesthetic and moral at once. As a novelist writing in an era obsessed with propriety, social performance, and the churn of talk in drawing rooms and newspapers, Meredith knows how speech can be cheapened by necessity - by politeness, by ambition, by the need to be seen participating. Silence, then, becomes not emptiness but restraint: a disciplined space where thought, feeling, and perception retain their complexity before being flattened into sentences.

The subtext is also a warning about what happens when interior life gets overexposed. Speech “changes” silence the way conversion reduces value: the ineffable becomes an utterance, the private becomes public, the nuanced becomes quotable. Meredith isn’t anti-language; he’s suspicious of how easily words become counterfeit confidence. The line flatters the reader who knows when not to speak, while reminding the writer that every sentence is a compromise - necessary, useful, but never the whole sum.