Jude the Obscure quotes

He pulled his straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought responsibilities, he found.

Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.

Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony.

He pulled his straw hat over his face, and peered through the interstices of the plaiting at the white brightness, vaguely reflecting. Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.

Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for.

That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony.

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived.

All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

Then, like the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. During the remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the afternoon, when there was nothing more to be done, he went into the village.

… lead-work, the glass of some of them oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny articles exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong man could have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long tideless time.

But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward he was always beholding a gorgeous city—the fancied place he had likened to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the painter’s imagination and less of the diamond merchant’s in his dreams …

not only so, but living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.

In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too, he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there.

Whenever he could get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or two, which was not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the hill and strain his eyes persistently;

Jude continued his walk homeward alone, pondering so deeply that he forgot to feel timid. He suddenly grew older.

It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to⁠—for some place which he could call admirable.

Should he find that place in this city if he could get there?

What was most required by citizens? Food, clothing, and shelter. An income from any work in preparing the first would be too meagre; for making the second he felt a distaste; the preparation of the third requisite he inclined to.

They built in a city; therefore he would learn to build.

He thought of his unknown uncle, his cousin Susanna’s father, an ecclesiastical worker in metal, and somehow medieval art in any material was a trade for which he had rather a fancy.

Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way, filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze.

He had just inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had evidently been hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not how long, but had somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a sheet of glass.

The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how.

Before they had climbed far they were nearly run into by two men who had been walking on the grass unseen.

“These lovers⁠—you find ’em out o’ doors in all seasons and weathers⁠—lovers and homeless dogs only,” said one of the men as they vanished down the hill.

“Are we lovers?” asked Jude.

what were his intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a single minute of time day by day? “Wasting!” It depended on your point of view to define that: he was just living for the first time: not wasting life.

It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!

When he got back to the house his aunt had gone to bed, and a general consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all things confronting him.

She was not there now, and “the embroidery of imagination upon the stuff of nature” so depicted her past presence that a void was in his heart which nothing could fill.

A pollard willow stood close to the place, and that willow was different from all other willows in the world.

Utter annihilation of the six days which must elapse before he could see her again as he had promised would have been his intensest wish if he had had only the week to live.

“I’m blown too. It was all up hill.”

They were in absolute solitude⁠—the most apparent of all solitudes, that of empty surrounding space.

Nobody could be nearer than a mile to them without their seeing him. They were, in fact, on one of the summits of the county, and the distant landscape around Christminster could be discerned from where they lay.

The parson who married them seemed to think it satisfactory too.

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.

Jude was exasperated, and went out to drag her in by main force. Then he suddenly lost his heat. Illuminated with the sense that all was over between them, and that it mattered not what she did, or he, her husband stood still, regarding her.

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.

“Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your mother, and your father’s sister ill-used her husband?” she asked. “All you be a queer lot as husbands and wives!”

It was curious, he thought. What was he reserved for? He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide.

Peaceful death abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him.

What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position? He could get drunk. Of course that was it; he had forgotten. Drinking was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless.

What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position? He could get drunk. Of course that was it; he had forgotten.

Drinking was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing worthless.

He began to see now why some men boozed at inns. He struck down the hill northwards and came to an obscure public-house.

The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles, lit in his soul a spark of the old fire.

Surely his plan should be to move onward through good and ill⁠—to avoid morbid sorrow even though he did see uglinesses in the world?

Bene agere et laetari—to do good cheerfully—which he had heard to be the philosophy of one Spinoza, might be his own even now.

… obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones.

It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.

Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard.

It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers.

Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard.

He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly presences with which the nooks were haunted.

Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs.

He had to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed by many of its professors to be work at all.

He examined the mouldings, stroked them as one who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy in the working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm, or convenient to the tool.

What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real.

Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been inflicted on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly struggle against years, weather, and man.

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.

He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed. They were marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude:

Moreover he perceived that at best only copying, patching and imitating went on here; which he fancied to be owing to some temporary and local cause.

He did not at that time see that medievalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic architecture and its associations had no place.

The deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in reverence was not yet revealed to him.

The Christminster “sentiment,” as it had been called, ate further and further into him; till he probably knew more about those buildings materially, artistically, and historically, than any one of their inmates.

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of his enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object of that enthusiasm he really was.

Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall—but what a wall!

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of his enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object of that enthusiasm he really was.

Only a wall divided him from those happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest. Only a wall⁠—but what a wall!

Every day, every hour, as he went in search of labour, he saw them going and coming also, rubbed shoulders with them, heard their voices, marked their movements.

“For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.”

His desire absorbed him, and left no part of him to weigh its practicability.

At this time he received a nervously anxious letter from his poor old aunt, on the subject which had previously distressed her—a fear that Jude would not be strong-minded enough to keep away from his cousin Sue Bridehead and her relations.

He remembered now that she was not a large figure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant. That was about all he had seen.

There was nothing statuesque in her; all was nervous motion.

She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have called her handsome or beautiful. But the much that she was surprised him. She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity that was his.

He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was some way advanced when he was put into a seat.

It was a louring, mournful, still afternoon, when a religion of some sort seems a necessity to ordinary practical men, and not only a luxury of the emotional and leisured classes.

In the dim light and the baffling glare of the clerestory windows he could discern the opposite worshippers indistinctly only, but he saw that Sue was among them.

But much as he wished to be an exemplar in these things he could not get on.

It was quite impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when your heart’s desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven.

So he excused himself. “After all,” he said, “it is not altogether an erotolepsy that is the matter with me, as at that first time. I can see that she is exceptionally bright;

Though they had talked of nothing more than general subjects Jude was surprised to find what a revelation of woman his cousin was to him.

She was so vibrant that everything she did seemed to have its source in feeling.

An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so fast that he could hardly keep up with her; and her sensitiveness on some points was such that it might have been misread as vanity.

“You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a man walking through the streets. It is a unique centre of thought and religion—the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country.

All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of infinite motion⁠—the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile of a well-known writer.

”

Here the two sexes had met for loving, hating, coupling, parting; had waited, had suffered, for each other; had triumphed over each other; cursed each other in jealousy, blessed each other in forgiveness.

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life.

These struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of the humours of things.

“I don’t dislike it, you know.

I think it is noble to see a man’s hands subdued to what he works in.

… Well, I’m rather glad I came to this Training School, after all. See how independent I shall be after the two years’ training! I shall pass pretty high, I expect, and Mr. Phillotson will use his influence to get me a big school.”

“I rather like this,” said Sue, while their entertainers were clearing away the dishes. “

Outside all laws except gravitation and germination.

”

“Perhaps not. Better women would not. People say I must be cold-natured—sexless—on account of it. But I won’t have it!

Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.

”

There was another long silence. He felt that she was treating him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way.

Her very helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he.

“I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so hard,” he said, to turn the subject. “I am absorbed in Theology, you know. And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you weren’t here?

“And I for something broader, truer,” she insisted. “

At present intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each other.

”

“Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust.

Life isn’t long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it.

I take Christianity.”

Over these phrases the schoolmaster pored.

What precise shade of satisfaction was to be gathered from a woman’s gratitude that the man who loved her had not been often to see her?

The problem occupied him, distracted him.

How will the demigods in your Pantheon—I mean those legendary persons you call Saints—intercede for you after this? Now if I had done such a thing it would have been different, and not remarkable, for I at least don’t regard marriage as a Sacrament.

Your theories are not so advanced as your practice!

”

But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of her identity was denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the wilfulness of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent alone.

Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.

“If at the estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see her child—hers solely—there would be comfort in it!” said Jude.

“

Don’t you ask questions, and you won’t hear lies.

”

The one you speak of I have lent to various friends about here and Melchester, and so it has got to be sung a little.

But music is a poor staff to lean on⁠—I am giving it up entirely.

You must go into trade if you want to make money nowadays. The wine business is what I am thinking of. This is my forthcoming list—it is not issued yet—but you can take one.”

It is no trouble to get the kettle and things brought in. We don’t live at the school, you know, but in that ancient dwelling across the way called Old-Grove Place. It is so antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully.

Such houses are very well to visit, but not to live in⁠—I feel crushed into the earth by the weight of so many previous lives there spent.

In a new place like these schools there is only your own life to support. Sit down, and I’ll tell Ada to bring the tea-things across.”

Yet I can’t tell you the truth—I should shock you by letting you know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I feel that I shouldn’t have been provided with attractiveness unless it were meant to be exercised!

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 licence to receive it.

But you are so straightforward, Jude, that you can’t understand me! … Now you must go. I am sorry my husband is not at home.”

He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation. Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle irreverence, called his demigods, would have shunned such encounters if they doubted their own strength. But he could not.

He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine.

It was idiotic of me—there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I rushed on, when I had got into that Training School scrape, with all the cock-sureness of the fool that I was! …

I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly!

I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick. … When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!”

… I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick. …

When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!

”

Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally, if not wrongly. She was inclined to call it the latter; for

Sue’s logic was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that being done it became wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in theory were wrong in practice.

“I have been too weak, I think!” she jerked out as she pranced on, shaking down teardrops now and then. “It was burning, like a lover’s—O it was!

On rising the next morning he immediately looked into the closet, but Sue had already gone downstairs. There was a little nest where she had lain, and spiders’ webs hung overhead. “

What must a woman’s aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!

” he said bitterly.

“But I do ask it!

Domestic laws should be made according to temperaments, which should be classified. If people are at all peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very rules that produce comfort in others!

… Will you let me?”

We shall both be dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you relieved me from constraint for a little while? I daresay you think me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something absurd.

Well⁠—why should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn’t hurt other people?

”

“Yes—that’s it! I am in the wrong. I always am!

It is as culpable to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!

”

She has conscientiously struggled against it, but to no purpose. I cannot bear it—I cannot! I can’t answer her arguments—she has read ten times as much as I.

Her intellect sparkles like diamonds, while mine smoulders like brown paper.

… She’s one too many for me!”

But is that essentially right, and proper, and honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish? I don’t profess to decide.

I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of themselves.

If a person who has blindly walked into a quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible.”

But is that essentially right, and proper, and honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish? I don’t profess to decide. I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles take care of themselves.

If a person who has blindly walked into a quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible.

”

“Yes. …

I would have died for her; but I wouldn’t be cruel to her in the name of the law.

She is, as I understand, gone to join her lover. What they are going to do I cannot say. Whatever it may be she has my full consent to.”

if any such there be!

My point of bliss is not upward, but here.

”

“I make only one condition—that you are tender and kind to her. I know you love her.

But even love may be cruel at times.

You are made for each other: it is obvious, palpable, to any unbiased older person. You were all along ‘the shadowy third’ in my short life with her. I repeat, take care of Sue.”

“Not mentally. But I haven’t the courage of my views, as I said before. I didn’t marry him altogether because of the scandal.

But sometimes a woman’s love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn’t love him at all.

Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.”

“What I say is quite true,” Phillotson continued testily. “She asked leave to go away with her lover, and I let her. Why shouldn’t I? A woman of full age, it was a question for her own conscience—not for me.

I was not her gaoler.

I can’t explain any further. I don’t wish to be questioned.”

“Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true, you are not the only one in the world to see it, dear little Sue.

People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.

No doubt my father and mother, and your father and mother, saw it, if they at all resembled us in habits of observation. But then they went and married just the same, because they had ordinary passions.

“I really fear sometimes that you cannot,” he said, with a dubiousness approaching anger. “And you are so reticent. I know that women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man.

But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides.

Not being men, these women don’t know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man’s heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct.

“Perhaps I am coarse too, worse luck! I have the germs of every human infirmity in me, I verily believe—that was why I saw it was so preposterous of me to think of being a curate.

I have cured myself of drunkenness I think; but I never know in what new form a suppressed vice will break out in me!

I do love you, Sue, though I have danced attendance on you so long for such poor returns!

I didn’t care about her being in trouble, and what she wished to tell you! Perhaps it was really something she was justified in telling you. That’s some more of my badness, I suppose!

Love has its own dark morality when rivalry enters in⁠—at least, mine has, if other people’s hasn’t.

… I wonder how she got on? I hope she reached the inn all right, poor woman.”

I would take him and bring him up. The beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not?

All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care.

That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.”

At these the fellow-passengers laughed, except the solitary boy bearing the key and ticket, who, regarding the kitten with his saucer eyes, seemed mutely to say: “

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

”

Occasionally at a stoppage the guard would look into the compartment and say to the boy, “All right, my man. Your box is safe in the van.” The boy would say, “Yes,” without animation, would try to smile, and fail.

He was Age masquerading as Juvenility, and doing it so badly that his real self showed through crevices.

A ground swell from ancient years of night seemed now and then to lift the child in this his morning-life, when his face took a back view over some great Atlantic of Time, and appeared not to care about what it saw.

He followed his directions literally, without an inquiring gaze at anything. It could have been seen that the boy’s ideas of life were different from those of the local boys.

Children begin with detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal.

The boy seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the particulars. To him the houses, the willows, the obscure fields beyond, were apparently regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows;

“Well—it was significant,” said Sue. “

There’s more for us to think about in that one little hungry heart than in all the stars of the sky.

… I suppose, dear, we must pluck up courage, and get that ceremony over? It is no use struggling against the current, and I feel myself getting intertwined with my kind. O Jude, you’ll love me dearly, won’t you, afterwards!

“

The flowers in the bride’s hand are sadly like the garland which decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!

”

He knew what they were saying and thinking. “I am very, very sorry, father and mother,” he said. “But please don’t mind!—I can’t help it.

I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking they’d be all withered in a few days!

”

But the mistake (as it was called) of their going away so secretly to do the business, kept up much of the mystery of their lives; and they found that they made not such advances with their neighbours as they had expected to do thereby.

A living mystery was not much less interesting than a dead scandal.

The baker’s lad and the grocer’s boy, who at first had used to lift their hats gallantly to Sue when they came to execute their errands, in these days no longer took the trouble to render her that homage, and the neighbouring artizans’ wives looked …

“It was so foolish of me!

O why should Nature’s law be mutual butchery!

”

“It is not that I am ashamed—not as you think!

But it seems such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world⁠—so presumptuous⁠—that I question my right to do it sometimes!

”

“Be damned if I do!

Feelings are feelings! I won’t be a creeping hypocrite any longer⁠—so there!

”

“Yes,” said Phillotson, with biting sadness. “

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!

”

“

However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten.

It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses—affections—vices perhaps they should be called—were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages;

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?’ ”

… quest of the lodging, and at last found something that seemed to promise well, in Mildew Lane—a spot which to Jude was irresistible—though to Sue it was not so fascinating—a narrow lane close to the back of a college, but having no communication with it.

The little houses were darkened to gloom by the high collegiate buildings, within which life was so far removed from that of the people in the lane as if it had been on opposite sides of the globe; yet only a thickness of wall divided them.

Two or three of the houses had notices of rooms to let, and the newcomers knocked at the door of one, which a woman opened.

“

But we don’t ask to be born?

”

“Hush!” he said, pressing her little face against his breast as if she were an infant. “It is bereavement that has brought you to this!

Such remorse is not for you, my sensitive plant, but for the wicked ones of the earth⁠—who never feel it!

”

“Still on the same tack!

But is there anything better on earth than that we should love one another?

”

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? How you argued that marriage was only a clumsy contract—which it is—how you showed all the objections to it—all the absurdities!

If two and two made four when we were happy together, surely they make four now?

I can’t understand it, I repeat!”

“Yes. Very well! … Perhaps it was wrong of me to argue distastefully as I have done! Perhaps as we couldn’t conscientiously marry at first in the old-fashioned way, we ought to have parted.

Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours!

Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!”

“O Sue!” said he with a sudden sense of his own danger. “

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!

You have been my social salvation. Stay with me for humanity’s sake! You know what a weak fellow I am. My two Arch Enemies you know—my weakness for womankind and my impulse to strong liquor.

“Well—never mind; don’t grieve,” said Jude generously. “I did suffer, God knows, about you at that time; and now I suffer again. But perhaps not so much as you.

The woman mostly gets the worst of it in the long run!

”

Yet such was his obstinate and illogical disregard of opinion, and of the principles in which he had been trained, that his convictions on the rightness of his course with his wife had not been disturbed.

Principles which could be subverted by feeling in one direction were liable to the same catastrophe in another.

The instincts which had allowed him to give Sue her liberty now enabled him to regard her as none the worse for her life with Jude.

It arose from a wish to make their lives, if not a success, at least no such disastrous failure as they threatened to become, through his acting on what he had considered at the time a principle of justice, charity, and reason.

To indulge one’s instinctive and uncontrolled sense of justice and right, was not, he had found, permitted with impunity in an old civilization like ours.

It was necessary to act under an acquired and cultivated sense of the same, if you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and honour; and to let crude loving-kindness take care of itself.

Your generous devotion to me is unparalleled, Jude! Your worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit rather than to your blame. Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good.

Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.

… ‘Charity seeketh not her own.’ ”

“No. Be hanged if I can. … I don’t know what the times be coming to!

Matrimony have growed to be that serious in these days that one really do feel afeard to move in it at all.

In my time we took it more careless; and I don’t know that we was any the worse for it!