"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."

"So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky."

"You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always."

"A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years."

"When the love-led man had ceased from his labours Bathsheba came and looked him in the face.'Gabriel, will you you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon.'I will,' said Gabriel.And she smiled on him again."

"As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them-the part of-who is it?-Venus Urania."

"I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose."

"To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature."

"The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this."

"Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!"

"Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art."

"Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love 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 any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new."

"Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires."

"The flowers in the bride's hand are sadly like the garland which decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!"Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That's what some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him."

"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."

"Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him."

"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."

"A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown."

"Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occassional laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride - the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won from all other women - unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted."

"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."

"Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct."

"Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length."

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

"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."

"All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun."

"The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given."

"Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel."

"The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men."

"Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe."

"My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own."

"Always wanting another man than your own."

"Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel."

"You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you."

"The world is as it used to be:
'All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christ’s sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.'

That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they'd have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening....

'Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).'"

"The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing."

"Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression."

"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."

"I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!"

"It was the week after Easter holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the light spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as they steamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled season shone on the grass with the freshness of an occasional inspector rather than as an accustomed proprietor."

"Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony."

"Give way to the Better if way to the Better there be It exacts a full look at the Worst."

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

"But you shouldn't have let her. That's the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high--innocent or guilty. She'd have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! It's all the same in the end! However, I think she's fond of her man still--whatever he med be of her. You were too quick about her. I shouldn't have let her go! I should have kept her chained on-- her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There's nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you've got the laws on your side. Moses knew."

"Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would."

"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."

"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..."

"I don't want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don't want to see the original realities " as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The 'simply natural' is interesting no longer."

"She soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait. . . . Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they."

"Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken."

"My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all."