Thomas Hardy Quotes
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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.
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Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
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To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.
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But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
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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.
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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.
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I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!
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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
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My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
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Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one.
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This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.
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I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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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.
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I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
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It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
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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!
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")
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You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
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O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
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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.