Thomas Hardy Quotes

See what deceits love sows in honest minds!

His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to previous ones.Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and by this time every couple had been suitably matched. It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.

And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.

The vast difference between starting a train of events, and directing into a particular groove a series already started, is rarely apparent to the person confounded by the issue.

...there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.

We are acting by the letter; and 'the letter killeth.

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

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.

Women are never tired of bewailing man’s fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy.

Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.

Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship — camaraderie — usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death — that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.

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

Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with trouble