“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!”

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

All romances end at marriage.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

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.

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 license to receive it.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring 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.

Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.

I think perhaps I will always hold a candle for you – even until it burns my hand. And when the light has long since gone I will be there in the darkness holding what remains, quite simply because I cannot let go.

The lamp burns bright when wick and oil are clean.

Great men are meteors designed to burn so that earth may be lighted.

Loving someone is slow dancing with emotions in a burning room.

If you want to shine like sun first you have to burn like it.

No matter how many tears are running down her face, They’ll never stand a chance to the fire burning in her heart.

Remembrance, like a candle, burns brightest at Christmas time.