Thomas Hardy Quotes
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Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
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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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So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.
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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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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one.
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Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me!
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And yet to every bad there is a worse.
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People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.
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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.
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
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A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
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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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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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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
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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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Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
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I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
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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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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.
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To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.