Thomas Hardy Quotes

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

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.

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.

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

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

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

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

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.

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

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

...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.

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

Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

Done because we are too many.

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

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.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.

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.

You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.

You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.

The defective can be more than the entire.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.