Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it Tess?
Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Some folk want their luck buttered.
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession.
It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only – only – don’t make it more than I can bear!
So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope...
I may do some good before I am dead – be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.