Thomas Hardy Quotes

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

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

I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity!

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

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

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

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.

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

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

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.

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.

It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!

Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.

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

War makes rattling good history.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.

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

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

- 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.

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

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

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

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

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

All romances end at marriage.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

The defective can be more than the entire.

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.

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.

Done because we are too many.

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

Always wanting another man than your own.

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

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

You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.