Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

Meredith’s line is a polite provocation aimed at a culture that still treated “wit” as decorative sparkle - verbal fencing for drawing rooms, all style and no stakes. By insisting that true wit draws from “truth itself,” he flips the hierarchy: cleverness isn’t the source of insight; insight is the fuel that makes cleverness cut. The metaphor does quiet heavy lifting. A “well” suggests depth, replenishment, something earned by digging. It also implies a community resource: you don’t manufacture water, you find it. Wit, in this view, isn’t a parlor trick but a discovery method - a way of tapping what’s already real and making it newly drinkable.

The subtext is a warning against the hollow performance of intelligence. Meredith wrote in a Victorian literary ecosystem crowded with epigrammatic showmen and social satire that could glide on cruelty or mere contrarian flair. His own fiction, especially The Egoist, treats conversation as a battleground where vanity, self-deception, and status anxiety reveal themselves. “True wit” becomes a moral instrument: it punctures illusion, exposes the ego, and refuses to flatter.

There’s also a sly defense of the novelist’s craft. Meredith is arguing that comedy and critique aren’t lesser modes than earnest realism; they’re realism with sharpened teeth. When wit is anchored in truth, it stops being entertainment-as-evasion and turns into a pressure test for society’s lies. The laugh lands because it’s accurate.