Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.
THOMAS HARDYSilence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.
More Thomas Hardy Quotes
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Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
THOMAS HARDY -
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
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A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
THOMAS HARDY -
To be loved to madness–such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
THOMAS HARDY -
That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!
THOMAS HARDY -
If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
THOMAS HARDY -
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
THOMAS HARDY -
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
THOMAS HARDY -
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
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Some folk want their luck buttered.
THOMAS HARDY -
There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
THOMAS HARDY -
People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.
THOMAS HARDY -
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
THOMAS HARDY -
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
THOMAS HARDY -
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
THOMAS HARDY -
And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you.
THOMAS HARDY -
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
THOMAS HARDY -
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.
THOMAS HARDY -
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.
THOMAS HARDY -
When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.
THOMAS HARDY -
Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
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Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
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It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.
THOMAS HARDY -
You have never loved me as I love you–never–never! Yours is not a passionate heart–your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite– not a woman!
THOMAS HARDY -
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
THOMAS HARDY