Thomas Hardy Quotes (206 Quotes)

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

They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

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.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.

Never in her life - she could swear it from the bottom of her soul - had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

What woman, indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness?

I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.

Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.

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 center 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.

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

Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

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

To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating.

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.

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

O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order

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

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction -- every kind of evidence in the logician's list -- have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

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

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...

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.

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.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

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.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. 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 made close acquaintance with phenomena he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

Love is an utterly bygone, sorry, worn-out, miserable thing with me- for him or anyone else.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

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

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her-doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.

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

Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity

Always wanting another man than your own.

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

How strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope....

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one.

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

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!

Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.

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.

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

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

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

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.