Thomas Hardy Quotes

"A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all."

"A 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."

"An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, in blast-beruffled plume."

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

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

"Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons."

"Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs."

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

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

"Fear is the mother of foresight."

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

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

"Had other aims than my delight."

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

"I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence."

"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!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity."

"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."

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

"Some folk want their luck buttered."

"That man's silence is wonderful to listen to."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them."

"You was a good man, and did good things."