Thomas Hardy Quotes

I may do some good before I am dead — be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

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

That the party was intended to be a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt.

She is one of those people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody knows her entirely.

I looked up from my writing,
And gave a start to see,
As if rapt in my inditing,
The moon's full gaze on me.

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

A local cult, called Christianity.

How unexpected [are] the attacks of destiny!

Aggressive Fancy working spells Upon a mind o’erwrought.

To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience...

[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait. . . . Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.

Is your heart far away, Or with mine beating? When false things are brought low, And swift things have grown slow, Feigning like froth shall go, Faith be for aye.

But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession