Thomas Hardy Quotations

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

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

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.

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

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

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

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

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

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

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.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.

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

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

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

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

Unto this wood I came As to a nest; Dreaming that sylvan peace Offered the harrowed ease- Nature a soft release From men's unrest

Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might Which fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight.

So little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on terrestrial things / Afar or nigh around, / That I could think there trembled through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.

Silent? ah, he is silent! He can keep silence well. That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

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.

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.

If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!

Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it, / And pay a million priests to bring it. / After two thousand years of mass / We've got as far as poison-gas.

Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be - and the non-necessity of it.

Who's in the next room? - who? / I seemed to see / Somebody in the dawning passing through,/ Unknown to me.

What of the faith and fire within us / Men who march away / Ere the barncocks say / Night is growing gray, / Leaving all that here can win us?

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

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

There's not a modest maiden elf / But dreads the final Trumpet, / Lest half of her should rise herself, / And half some sturdy strumpet!

The sky was clear -- remarkably clear -- and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.

So zestfully canst thou sing? / And all this indignity, / With God's consent, on thee! / Blinded ere yet a-wing.

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

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

Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!

Smile out; but still suffer: / The paths of love are rougher / Than thoroughfares of stones.

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.

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.

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 . . .

All her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened, and things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her little wishes and ways will all be as nothing.

The excessive regard of parents for their children, and their dislike of other people's is, like class feeling, patriotism, save-your-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.

You was a good man, and did good things.

And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate-bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I

And both of us, scorning parochial ways, / Had lived like the wives in the patriarchs' days.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be - and whenever I look up, there you shall be

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

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

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.

He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

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

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

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.

...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.

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

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

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

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

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

Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

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?

WEATHERS This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly; And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at 'The Traveller's Rest,' And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I. This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I; When beeches drip in browns and duns, And thresh and ply; And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe, And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.

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

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

George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

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

Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.

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.

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.

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.

...Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!' 'For how long?' 'O - ever so long. Days and days.' 'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!' 'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.

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.

You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!

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.

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 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.

Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.

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

Done because we are too many.