"Beauty, thou art twice blessed; thou blessest the gazer and the possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet disposition—a lovely soul—an affectionate nature—will speak in the eyes—the lips—the brows—and become the cause of beauty. On the other hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the world—to be cheerful and serene—to hope and to confide. There is more wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face."

"When stars are in the quiet skies, &emsp;Then most I pine for thee; Bend on me, then, thy tender eyes, &emsp;As stars look on the sea!"

"There is no anguish like an error of which we feel ashamed."

"Books are waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought."

"The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone."

"There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace."

"Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus—it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it."

"He who has loved often has loved never."

"Buy my flowers—O buy—I pray! The blind girl comes from afar; If the earth be as fair as her children say, These flowers her children are!"

"Fate laughs at probabilities."

"Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature: it makes the proud man meek,—the cheerful, sad,—the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy, fall before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character."

"The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells."

"Poverty makes some humble, but more malignant."

"Repent!—that is the idlest word in our language."

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

"He is certainly a man who bathes and "lives cleanly," (two especial charges preferred against him by Messrs. the Great Unwashed)."

"It is not Wisdom, but Ignorance, which teaches men presumption; Genius may be sometimes arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as Knowledge."

"The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self."

"A good heart is better than all the heads in the world."

"There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy."

"Two lives that once part, are as ships that divide When, moment on moment there rushes between &emsp;&emsp;&emsp;The one and the other, a sea,— Ah, never can fall from the days that have been &emsp;&emsp;&emsp;A gleam on the years that shall be."

"'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison-gas."

"One of the most dramatic of novelists—except on the rare occasions when he is melodramatic—Mr Hardy has endued with life and colour all that a student of antiquities, history, architecture, and folk-lore could discover relating to his native county; and with wonderful accuracy, lightness, and charm he has revealed the poetry with which the ways of the woodman and the farmer, the neatherd, the shepherd, and other rural figures, are still surrounded."

"(If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?) Thomas Hardy. Ever since I first read him, in high school, I’ve felt a kinship with his characters, his sense of place, his pitiless vision of humanity. I continue to reread him as often as I can. The architecture of his novels is magnificent, and the way his characters move through time and space is remarkably controlled. The world he creates is absolutely specific, as is the psychological terrain. In spite of the great scope of his work, its breadth and complexity, the prose is clean, straightforward, economical. No scene, no detail, no sentence is wasted."

"But oh yes, dear Louis, she [Tess] is vile. The pretence of 'sexuality' is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style."

"Tess has become a national icon, like Heathcliff, a melodramatic archetype, regarded as common cultural property, who has taken on a life independent of the original novel. The fact that a production is unfaithful to Hardy is almost irrelevant. Hardy saw the lives of the humblest labourers as a Greek tragedy. His novels are remorseless litanies of misery and despair. I suspect that townies who romanticise rural life will be doomed to spend aeons in purgatory as the wretched characters in his novels to punish their sentimentality."

"I was twelve when I read my first Hardy. It was Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I can remember the thrill of the whole new world of emotion and experience it opened up to me. I went day by day to the public library to read other Hardys till I got stuck half-way through Jude the Obscure. That was the end of Hardy for me at that time."

"The God of Meredith is impersonal; but he is often more healthy and kindly than any of the persons. That of Thomas Hardy is almost made personal by the intense feeling that he is poisonous. Nature is always coming in to save Meredith's women; Nature is always coming in to betray and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr. Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its mind to fight with."

"Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot."

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

"The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job."

"If all hearts were open and all desires known — as they would be if people showed their souls — how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!"

"To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet."

"Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called the 'Golden Rule' from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwin himself did not quite perceive it. While man was deemed to be a creation apart from all other creations, a secondary or tertiary morality was considered good enough to practise towards the 'inferior' races; but no person who reasons nowadays can escape the trying conclusion that this is not maintainable. And though we may not at present see how the principle of equal justice all round is to be carried out in it entirety, I recognise that the League is grappling with the question."

"People call me a pessimist; and if it is pessimism to think, with Sophocles, that "not to have been born is best," then I do not reject the designation. I never could understand why the word "pessimism" should be such a red rag to many worthy people; and I believe, indeed, that a good deal of the robustious, swaggering optimism of recent literature is at bottom cowardly and insincere. I do not see that we are likely to improve the world by asseverating, however loudly, that black is white, or at least that black is but a necessary contrast and foil, without which white would be white no longer. That is mere juggling with a metaphor. But my pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs, and that Ahriman is winning all along the line. On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist. What are my books but one plea against "man's inhumanity to man" — to woman — and to the lower animals? [...] Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men make it much worse than it need be. When we have got rid of a thousand remediable ills, it will be time enough to determine whether the ill that is irremediable outweighs the good."

"Since as a child I used to lie Upon the leaze and watch the sky, Never, I own, expected I That life would all be fair."

"Well, World, you have kept faith with me, Kept faith with me; Upon the whole you have proved to be Much as you said you were."

"A star looks down at me, And says: "Here I and you Stand each in our degree: What do you mean to do,— Mean to do?""

"And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I."

"This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I."

"This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly; And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at "The Traveller's Rest", And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I."