Best Thomas Hardy Quotes

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!

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

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.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

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.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

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

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs.

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

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!

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.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it.

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.

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

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.