The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never ...
THOMAS HARDY There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
THOMAS HARDY A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in ...
THOMAS HARDY Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
THOMAS HARDY Tess's feminine hope - shall we confess it - had been so obstinately recuperative as to revive in he...
THOMAS HARDY I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.
THOMAS HARDY A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never...
THOMAS HARDY At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me....
THOMAS HARDY Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonize...
THOMAS HARDY People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfe...
THOMAS HARDY Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only v...
THOMAS HARDY There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place. The s...
THOMAS HARDY If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
THOMAS HARDY Some folk want their luck buttered.
THOMAS HARDY It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to expre...
THOMAS HARDY Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
THOMAS HARDY Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired...
THOMAS HARDY The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
THOMAS HARDY If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- ho...
THOMAS HARDY Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
THOMAS HARDY Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.
THOMAS HARDY Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveli...
THOMAS HARDY Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!
THOMAS HARDY Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction...
THOMAS HARDY I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times an...
THOMAS HARDY Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the...
THOMAS HARDY Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
THOMAS HARDY Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
THOMAS HARDY Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
THOMAS HARDY Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Wome...
THOMAS HARDY Man, without religion, is the creature of circumstances.
THOMAS HARDY A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance...
THOMAS HARDY That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
THOMAS HARDY If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
THOMAS HARDY A lover without discretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY ...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes
THOMAS HARDY Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
THOMAS HARDY If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be conce...
THOMAS HARDY There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than ca...
THOMAS HARDY A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after...
THOMAS HARDY Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little p...
THOMAS HARDY In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us...
THOMAS HARDY The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidan...
THOMAS HARDY You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.
THOMAS HARDY If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- ...
THOMAS HARDY Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the l...
THOMAS HARDY You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to mak...
THOMAS HARDY To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
THOMAS HARDY But you shouldn't have let her. That's the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high--innoce...
THOMAS HARDY You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
THOMAS HARDY I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!
THOMAS HARDY Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honour as deserving real distincti...
THOMAS HARDY A lover without discretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only...
THOMAS HARDY A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY Fear is the mother of foresight.
THOMAS HARDY Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
THOMAS HARDY The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is ...
THOMAS HARDY Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many ...
THOMAS HARDY I shall be breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.
THOMAS HARDY Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness ha...
THOMAS HARDY There's not a modest maiden elf / But dreads the final Trumpet, / Lest half of her should rise herse...
THOMAS HARDY I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot ...
THOMAS HARDY Silent? ah, he is silent! He can keep silence well. That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY The excessive regard of parents for their children, and their dislike of other people's is, like cla...
THOMAS HARDY Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change
THOMAS HARDY The bower we shrined to Tennyson, / Gentlemen, / Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon / Sagged sea...
THOMAS HARDY To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world east...
THOMAS HARDY It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and tha...
THOMAS HARDY I have been looking for god for fifty years and I think if he had existed I should have discovered h...
THOMAS HARDY Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
THOMAS HARDY Where once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, / The floors are shrunken, cobwebs hang.
THOMAS HARDY Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would
THOMAS HARDY The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him
THOMAS HARDY 'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it, / And pay a million priests to bring it. / After two thous...
THOMAS HARDY The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidan...
THOMAS HARDY I am the family face; / Flesh perishes, I live on, / Projecting trait and trace / Through time to ti...
THOMAS HARDY Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity
THOMAS HARDY I need not go / Through sleet and snow / To where I know / She waits for me: / She will tarry there ...
THOMAS HARDY A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
THOMAS HARDY The sky was clear -- remarkably clear -- and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs ...
THOMAS HARDY This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better...
THOMAS HARDY We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them th...
THOMAS HARDY The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.
THOMAS HARDY Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wander...
THOMAS HARDY Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be...
THOMAS HARDY He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all...
THOMAS HARDY I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; ...
THOMAS HARDY There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we be...
THOMAS HARDY Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
THOMAS HARDY This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortu...
THOMAS HARDY Women are never tired of bewailing man’s fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his consta...
THOMAS HARDY So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or...
THOMAS HARDY Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and...
THOMAS HARDY You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter...
THOMAS HARDY Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who k...
THOMAS HARDY Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
THOMAS HARDY And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will...
THOMAS HARDY --the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil th...
THOMAS HARDY Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almo...
THOMAS HARDY Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and incon...
THOMAS HARDY She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects...
THOMAS HARDY ...who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been melted into it when in a liquid state, ...
THOMAS HARDY Her suspense was terrible.
THOMAS HARDY If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard ...
THOMAS HARDY Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substi...
THOMAS HARDY The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very...
THOMAS HARDY With peace of mind came development, and with development beauty. Knowledge—the result of great na...
THOMAS HARDY Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of...
THOMAS HARDY And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, an...
THOMAS HARDY Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year roun...
THOMAS HARDY There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance int...
THOMAS HARDY He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon.
THOMAS HARDY The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a deli...
THOMAS HARDY The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by t...
THOMAS HARDY If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now!
THOMAS HARDY He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not reall...
THOMAS HARDY The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so...
THOMAS HARDY Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.
THOMAS HARDY It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.
THOMAS HARDY Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in s...
THOMAS HARDY Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.
THOMAS HARDY She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.
THOMAS HARDY Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed o...
THOMAS HARDY She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time ...
THOMAS HARDY Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a bri...
THOMAS HARDY She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes a...
THOMAS HARDY Some folks want their luck buttered.
THOMAS HARDY In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked that she was, and forgot that the defective can more...
THOMAS HARDY Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits w...
THOMAS HARDY Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?
THOMAS HARDY You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any ...
THOMAS HARDY He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, ...
THOMAS HARDY It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to exp...
THOMAS HARDY Rural solitude, which provides ample themes for the intellect and sweet occupations innumerable for ...
THOMAS HARDY There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
THOMAS HARDY If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
THOMAS HARDY Christmas Eve Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. "Now they are all on their knees," An elder...
THOMAS HARDY War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
THOMAS HARDY There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourse...
THOMAS HARDY No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
THOMAS HARDY So little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on terrestrial things / Afar or...
THOMAS HARDY Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in nois...
THOMAS HARDY So zestfully canst thou sing? / And all this indignity, / With God's consent, on thee! / Blinded ere...
THOMAS HARDY Perhaps you are making a cat's paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems...
THOMAS HARDY They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably u...
THOMAS HARDY It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and tha...
THOMAS HARDY But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed ang...
THOMAS HARDY I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the...
THOMAS HARDY It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vice...
THOMAS HARDY I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them parti...
THOMAS HARDY The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observ...
THOMAS HARDY Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as...
THOMAS HARDY What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?"

"Yes, dearest," he sa...
THOMAS HARDY Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now a...
THOMAS HARDY That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much o...
THOMAS HARDY ...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contin...
THOMAS HARDY Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
THOMAS HARDY She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but hersel...
THOMAS HARDY Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do...
THOMAS HARDY Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth ...
THOMAS HARDY In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, th...
THOMAS HARDY How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality...
THOMAS HARDY Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere...
THOMAS HARDY Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about [history] than I know already. [...] Becau...
THOMAS HARDY I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only ...
THOMAS HARDY My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
THOMAS HARDY This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
THOMAS HARDY The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses...
THOMAS HARDY Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…
THOMAS HARDY Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard again...
THOMAS HARDY Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but ...
THOMAS HARDY Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
THOMAS HARDY A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
THOMAS HARDY You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. A...
THOMAS HARDY ...it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall b...
THOMAS HARDY The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views up...
THOMAS HARDY My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial inte...
THOMAS HARDY you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom--hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I al...
THOMAS HARDY Had other aims than my delight.
THOMAS HARDY Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
THOMAS HARDY Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line -- less dir...
THOMAS HARDY Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements...
THOMAS HARDY On a Fine Morning”
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

WHENCE comes Solac...
THOMAS HARDY The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of...
THOMAS HARDY Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or ...
THOMAS HARDY She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the...
THOMAS HARDY The beggarly question of parentage--what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to thi...
THOMAS HARDY My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
THOMAS HARDY He had just reached the time of life at which 'young' is ceasing to be the prefix of 'man' in speaki...
THOMAS HARDY But no one came. Because no one ever does.
THOMAS HARDY My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
THOMAS HARDY The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the cou...
THOMAS HARDY And yet to every bad there is a worse.
THOMAS HARDY That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
THOMAS HARDY Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-relia...
THOMAS HARDY The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle ...
THOMAS HARDY