Thomas Hardy Quotes

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

There are considerations even before my consideration for you; reparations to be made-ties you know nothing of. If you repent of marrying, so do I.

He had just reached the time of life at which 'young' is ceasing to be the prefix of 'man' in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period of masculine life, for his intellect and emotions were clearly separate; he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the state wherin they become united again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family.In short he was twenty-eight and a bachelor.

They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them.

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 and 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?

I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand
As if to drink, into the brook,
And a faint figure seemed to stand
Above me, with the bygone look.

The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not adopting it.

Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.

Dairyman Crick's household of maids and man lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which needliness ends, and below the line at which the 'convenances' begin to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough

Stupors, however, do not last forever

Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends...

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

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.

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