Thomas Hardy Quotes
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Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.
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The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
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It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella)
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- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
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Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
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She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.
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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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By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?
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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.
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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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A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
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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.
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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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...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.
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Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.
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You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
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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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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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I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.