Thomas Hardy Quotes (206 Quotes)

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.

Describing the aged maltster in Far from the Madding Crowd Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

And Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.

Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Tempests may scath;
But love can not make smart
Again this year his heart
Who no heart hath.

That long drip of human tears.

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

I need not go Through sleet and snow To where I know She waits for me She will tarry there Till I find it fair, And have time to spare From company.

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock the holly whistles as it battles with itself the ash hisses amid its quiverings the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman.

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

Well; happiness comes in full to none:
Let peace lie on lulled lips: I will not say.

Ah stirring times we live instirring times.

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.

Good, but not religious good.

. . . that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

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

Fear is the mother of foresight.

And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

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 . . .

There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure.

Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring.

The all-urging Will, raptly magnipotent.

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love me not.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Regarded so long, we render thee sad?

Yet, though love is thus an end in itself, it must be believed to be the means to another end if it is to assume the rosy hues of an unalloyed pleasure.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

We fevered our years not thus:
Take of Life what it grants, without question!

Always washing, and never getting finished.

And the spirits of those who were homing Passed on, rushingly, Like the Pentecost Wind.

For do you love her, do you hate,
She knows not--cares not she:
Only the living feel the weight
Of loveless misery!

A little one-eyed, blinking sort o place.

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

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. 'Now they are all on their knees,' An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearth-side ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years yet, I feel If someone said on Christmas Eve, 'Come see the oxen kneel, In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,' I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.

And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We've got as far as poison-gas.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisisthe final overthrow.

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

So let it be, I said to Love.

The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob and how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no more.

Where once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, The floors are shrunken, cobwebs hang.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Never upon me
Had she thrown look of love so thorough-sped!