“Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?”

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.

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

Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.

A man never knows exactly how the child of his brain will strike other people.

I’ve started doing yoga and meditation, but I’m not very good at that kind of thing and turning my brain off.

The brain process that results in a joke materializing where no joke was before remains a mystery. I’m not aware of any scholarly, scientific or neurological studies on the subject.

Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man.

The way that we tried to approach every piece of music is, if the song had a brain, it would be aware of its catalog.

There’s not an idea in our heads that has not been worn shiny by someone else’s brains.

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.