Thomas Hardy

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

— Thomas Hardy

When I set out for Lyonnesse, And starlight lit my lonesomeness.

— Thomas Hardy

To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.

— Thomas Hardy

It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian – the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew.

— Thomas Hardy

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.

— Thomas Hardy

Good, but not religious-good.

— Thomas Hardy

For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.

— Thomas Hardy

Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more.

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!

— Thomas Hardy

I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.

— Thomas Hardy

If you are cheerful, and wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible.

— Thomas Hardy

See what deceits love sows in honest minds!

— Thomas Hardy

At once a voice arose among

— Thomas Hardy

To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.

— Thomas Hardy

William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough, And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!

— Thomas Hardy

Whence comes solace? Not from seeing, Whereby gray things golden seem.

— Thomas Hardy

When false things are brought low, Faith be for aye.

— Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate Had sought their household fires.

— Thomas Hardy

The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race? Such world I fashioned not.

— Thomas Hardy

Here by the baring bough Raking up leaves.

— Thomas Hardy

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

— Thomas Hardy

Yes; quaint and curious war is! Or help to half-a-crown.

— Thomas Hardy

The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, no sickened because of her pain.

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

We two kept house, the Past and I, Leaving me never alone.

— Thomas Hardy

Some folk want their luck buttered.

— Thomas Hardy

In a solitude of the sea And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

— Thomas Hardy

I seem but a dead man held on end Not even I — would undo me so!

— Thomas Hardy

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

— Thomas Hardy

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

— Thomas Hardy

What of the faith and fire within us Men who march away!

— Thomas Hardy

That night your great guns, unawares, We thought it was the Judgement Day.

— Thomas Hardy

I am the family face; Over oblivion.

— Thomas Hardy

Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the raindrop plows.

— Thomas Hardy

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, "He was a man who used to notice such things"?

— Thomas Hardy

This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I.

— Thomas Hardy

And meadow rivulets overflow, And so do I.

— Thomas Hardy

A star looks down at me, Mean to do?"

— Thomas Hardy

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!

— Thomas Hardy

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.

— Thomas Hardy

Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

— Thomas Hardy

The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.

— Thomas Hardy

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

— Thomas Hardy

Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

— Thomas Hardy

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale.

— Thomas Hardy

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.

— Thomas Hardy

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.

— Thomas Hardy

The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

— Thomas Hardy

Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial globe.

— Thomas Hardy

To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

— Thomas Hardy

Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live for—that's all is the matter with me!

— Thomas Hardy

The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be only partially before his time—to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.

— Thomas Hardy

A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.

— Thomas Hardy

Fear is the mother of foresight.

— Thomas Hardy

When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.

— Thomas Hardy

There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!

— Thomas Hardy

How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?

— Thomas Hardy

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.

— Thomas Hardy

And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!

— Thomas Hardy

Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody's hand!

— Thomas Hardy

But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that.

— Thomas Hardy

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. And that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. And that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. And that nobody is wished to see my dead body. And that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. And that no flours be planted on my grave. And that no man remember me.

— Thomas Hardy

Her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

— Thomas Hardy

All that blooth means heavy autumn work for him and his hands.

— Thomas Hardy

'Twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o' place.

— Thomas Hardy

She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind — or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

— Thomas Hardy

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

— Thomas Hardy

Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power.

— Thomas Hardy

Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"

— Thomas Hardy

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

— Thomas Hardy

How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?

— Thomas Hardy

—I speak as one who plumbs

— Thomas Hardy

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.

— Thomas Hardy

But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.

— Thomas Hardy

[Of a wedding:] And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

— Thomas Hardy

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.

— Thomas Hardy

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.

— Thomas Hardy

Done because we are too menny.

— Thomas Hardy

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!

— Thomas Hardy

What of the Immanent Will and Its designs? Eternal artistries in Circumstance.

— Thomas Hardy

Why doth IT so and so, and ever so, This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

— Thomas Hardy

A local cult, called Christianity.

— Thomas Hardy

Aggressive Fancy working spells Upon a mind o’erwrought.

— Thomas Hardy

Ere systemed suns were globed and lit The slaughters of the race were writ.

— Thomas Hardy

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

Firm the whole fabric stood,

— Thomas Hardy

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

— Thomas Hardy

I. At Tea

— Thomas Hardy

She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some time in the future those who had known her would say, 'It is the -th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died'; and there would be nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the place in month, week, season, or year.

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.

— Thomas Hardy

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

— Thomas Hardy