Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
So do flux and reflux–the rhythm of change–alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
If Fancy’s lips had been real cherries probably Dick’s would have appeared deeply stained.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
When women are secret they are secret indeed and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.
The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship – that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.
Gabriel Oak: “It’s time for you to fight your own battles… and win them too.
It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.
Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that’s saying a good deal.
When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?
Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable ; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s licence to receive it.
People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.
And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.
If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
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 is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.
There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm.
Geoffrey’s own heart felt inconveniently large just then.
…there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.
Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have ’em?
I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to ’em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!
He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.
I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.
He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another’s horizon is.
She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.
It was still early, and the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely.
Ah, dear Jude; that’s because you are like a totally deaf manobserving people listening to music. You say ‘What are theyregarding? Nothing is there.’ But something is.
It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.
Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.
Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind’s eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.
But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are.
The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.
Though fervent was our vow,Though ruddily ran our pleasure,Bliss has fulfilled its measure,And sees its sentence now.Ache deep; but make no moans:Smile out; but stilly suffer:The paths of love are rougherThan thoroughfares of stones.
Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting outof love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as ashort cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.
She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play
Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.
Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration.
An average woman is in this superior to an average man—that she never instigates, only responds.
She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks whilst a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek.
If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later.
Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.
Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.
They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.
being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.
I have sometimes thought–that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!
you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
If the story-tellers could ha’ got decency and good morals from true stories, who’d have troubled to invent parables?
You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.
And strange-eyed constellations reignHis stars eternally.
She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.
But I wish to be enlightened.”Let me caution you against it.”Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?”Yes, indeed.’She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement.
To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind. I would deceive her, And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind
Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.
Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires.
To see persons looking with children’s eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience…
Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard’s motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends…
He’s the man we were in search of, that’s true, and yet he’s not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.
All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.
Love has its own dark morality when rivalry enters in.
He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.
I looked up from my writing, And gave a start to see,As if rapt in my inditing, The moon’s full gaze on me.
This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly
There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.
But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet.
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
This supreme instance of Troy’s goodness fell upon Gabriel’s ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.
…our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes
A half knowledge of another’s life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.
What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes it’s only one!
I won’t be a slave to the past. I’ll love where I choose.
Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.
The curious double strands in Farfrae’s thread of life – the commercial and the romantic – were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.
She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day’s wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.
I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, ‘Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!
You don’t talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!
Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.
You have never loved me as I love you–never–never! Yours is not a passionate heart–your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite– not a woman!
Don’t take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can’t be yours?”That’s the very thing I say to myself,’ said Gabriel.
When you’ve made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand – she’s as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: ’tis only in the flourishes there’s a difference.
When you’ve made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand- she’s as good as any other; they’ll be all alike in the groundwork; ’tis only in the flourishes there’s a difference.
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
Give way to the Better if way to the Better there be It exacts a full look at the Worst.
War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.
Aspects are within us and who seems most kingly is king.
If way to the Better there be it exacts a full look at the Worst.
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
Patience that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone.
There is a good deal too strange to be believed nothing is too strange to have happened.
Dialect words – those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.
Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself – poor me!
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
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.
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.