Quotes by Thomas Hardy
Once victim, always victim - that's the law!
If all hearts were open and all desires known - as they would be if people showed their souls - how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!
Pessimism... is, in brief, 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.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
Fear is the mother of foresight.
There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
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.
Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Had other aims than my delight.
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, in blast-beruffled plume.
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.
