Always wanting another man than your own.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else.

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.

Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.

They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they.

You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it.

I hate to be what is called a clever girl--there are too many of that sort now!

O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity

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.

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

Done because we are too many.

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

I forgot the defective can be more than the whole

Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.

Good, better, best Never let it rest, Till ur good is better And better is best.

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.

I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman’s moments.

Some folks want their luck buttered.

Bless thy simplicity, Tess

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.

We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.

Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

And yet to every bad, there is a worse

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

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

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

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

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

Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.

--the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man...

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

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

I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.

She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving