“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.”

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

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.

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.

Our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

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.

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.

She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces… made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

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.