Thomas Hardy Quotes
-
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
-
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.
-
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.
-
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
-
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. 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.
-
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.
-
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
-
He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.
-
When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.
-
All romances end at marriage.
-
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
-
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
-
The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
-
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.
-
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
-
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!
-
...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 main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
-
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 tomorrows 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!
-
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
-
So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
-
Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?
-
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
-
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.