Thomas Hardy Quotes

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

- Thomas Hardy

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

- Thomas Hardy

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.

- 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

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

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

- Thomas Hardy

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

- Thomas Hardy

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

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.

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

- Thomas Hardy

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

- 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

Fear is the mother of foresight.

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

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.

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

Some folk want their luck buttered.

- Thomas Hardy

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

- Thomas Hardy

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

- Thomas Hardy

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.

- Thomas Hardy

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

- Thomas Hardy

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

- Thomas Hardy

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

- Thomas Hardy

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

- Thomas Hardy