From: Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

We might have got on tolerably, notwithstanding, but for two people, Miss Cathy and
Joseph, the servant: you saw him, I dare say, up yonder. He was, and is yet, most
likely, the wearisomest, self-righteous pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake
promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbours. By his knack of
sermonizing and pious discoursing, he contrived to make a great impression on Mr
Earnshaw; and the more feeble the master became, the more influence he gained. He
was relentless in worrying him about his soul’s concerns, and about ruling his children
rigidly.

From: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty years, has well
nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual descendant in the direct line from
Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a
man of Apostolic simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his
mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further
reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by those of his own date and
school of thinking as extreme; while, on the other hand, those totally opposed to him
were unwillingly won to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable
power he showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for applying
them. [...] One thing he certainly was—sincere.

[...]
THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.
2 PET. ii. 3.
Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses, the blue
air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards, these staring vermilion words shone
forth. They seemed to shout themselves out and make the atmosphere ring. Some
people might have cried `Alas, poor Theology!' at the hideous defacement - the last
grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859)
“natural selection”, “struggle for existence”

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871)

Matthew Arnold
 
 
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life
for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete;
and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by
poetry. (The Study of Poetry, 1880)

Thomas Henry Huxley, Agnosticism and Christianity (1889)

Thomas Hardy

From: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

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. Nature does not
often say `See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or
reply `Here!' to a body's cry of `Where?' till the hide and seek has become an irksome,
outworn game. [...] Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two
halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing
counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the
late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments,
shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.
From: Return of the Native, Ch. 1
“A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression” [description of Egdon Heath]
The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet
Egdon remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by weather, nor so
flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway, and a
still more aged barrow presently to be referred to — themselves almost crystallized to natural
products by long continuance — even the trifling irregularities were not caused by pickaxe,
plough, or spade, but remained as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.
Ch. 2 “Humanity Appears on the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble”

“novels of character and environment” (Hardy’s major novels):

 
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
The Return of the Native (1878)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
The Woodlanders (1887)
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)
Jude the Obscure (1895)

“The world does not despise us; it only neglects us.”

Thomas Hardy, a notebook entry 1865

Life’s Little Ironies (1894) – a collection of stories (includes “On the Western Circuit”)

From: Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his
sport with Tess.

From: “Hap” (1898)

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh […]

—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan