Thomas Hardy quotes:

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?

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

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

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

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.

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

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

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

the social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies

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

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.

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 which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.

She showed that oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps more frequent in women of darker complexion and more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmond's was; women who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak to them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents rather than steer."

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.

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

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

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

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

War makes rattling good history.

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

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.

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Fear is the mother of foresight

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

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly - the thought of the world's concern at her situation - was founded on illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience...

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 Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There's sommat in our blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound. ...

Nature does not often say 'See?' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game.

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.

A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We storytellers are all ancient mariners, and none of us is justified in stopping wedding guests, unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experiences of every average man and woman.

Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends...

I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!

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

Tell him everything; it is best. He will forgive you.

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

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

I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!

Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.

Perhaps you are making a cat's paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems so--to see you sitting up there so prim.

Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.

She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.

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

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.

Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.

Always wanting another man than your own.

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.

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

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

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.

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

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

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.

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

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

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

This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

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.

Done because we are too many.

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

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

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

He's the man we were in search of, that's true, and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.

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

Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

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

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted." "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one.

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity

Bless thy simplicity, Tess

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.

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.

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.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

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

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

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

Some folk want their luck buttered.

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

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

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

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

Fear is the mother of foresight.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

...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.

...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.

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

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

...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 social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...