But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me!
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.
Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
I forgot the defective can be more than the whole.
There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child.
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.