"Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it."

"Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity."

"He is as good as anybody in this parish! He is very particular, too, about going to church-yes, he is!''I am afeard nobody ever saw him there. I never did, certainly.''The reason of that is,' she said eagerly, 'that he goes in privately by the old tower door, just when the service commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me so.'This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it."

"Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike."

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

"The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more."

"Gabriel Oak: "It's time for you to fight your own battles... and win them too."

"To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind. I would deceive her, And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind."

"I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?"

"Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf manobserving people listening to music. You say 'What are theyregarding? Nothing is there.' But something is."

"She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct."

"Patience that blending of moral courage with physical timidity."

"We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks whilst a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek."

"It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet."

"I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all."

"Her suspense was terrible."

"The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain."

"Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?"

"She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects."

"Aspects are within us and who seems most kingly is king."

"I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence."

"But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is."

"If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?"

"The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse."

"Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?"

"No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure."

"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; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman's part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba's position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off."

"A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away."

"And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore."

"There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there."

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion."

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

"He's the man we were in search of, that's true, and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted."

"Don't that make your bosom plim?"

"A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest."

"Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another."

"I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!"

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

"This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock."

"She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath."

"When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference."

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

"My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker."

"Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition."

"If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained."

"It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one."

"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."

"But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet."

"As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray."

"When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines."