“Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.”

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

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.

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.

Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

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!

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

I wish I had never been born–there or anywhere else.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

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.

How cruel, your veins are full of ice-water and mine are boiling.

In one consort there sat cruel revenge and rancorous despite, disloyal treason and heart-burning hate.

Love is not full of pity (as men say) But deaf and cruel, where he means to pray.

Religion is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

You call me cruel after I finally chose to love myself fully before you.

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

Terror made me cruel.

Who knows, my God, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?