Thomas Hardy Quotes

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

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

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.

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.

But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

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.

But no one came. Because no one ever does.

You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.

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

Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.

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

Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one

By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?

Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.

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.

Bless thy simplicity, Tess

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.

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.

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child.

I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

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.

Gabriel Oak: "It's time for you to fight your own battles... and win them too.

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

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.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?

And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations.

It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm.

Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then.

...there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.

She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?

I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.

It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.

Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.

But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are.

The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting outof love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as ashort cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

Don't that make your bosom plim?

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play