Thomas Hardy Quotes

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

That aspects are within us; and who seems Most kingly is the King.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

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.

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.

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

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.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak

He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

The beggarly question of parentage--what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?

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.

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.

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.

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.

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

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.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.

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.