Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
THOMAS HARDYAll romances end at marriage.
More Thomas Hardy Quotes
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If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
THOMAS HARDY -
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
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 -
Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.
THOMAS HARDY -
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.
THOMAS HARDY -
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
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 -
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
THOMAS HARDY -
You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
THOMAS HARDY -
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
THOMAS HARDY -
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
THOMAS HARDY -
Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
THOMAS HARDY -
All romances end at marriage.
THOMAS HARDY -
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 -
You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.
THOMAS HARDY -
If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
THOMAS HARDY -
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 overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.
THOMAS HARDY -
Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
THOMAS HARDY -
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
THOMAS HARDY -
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.
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 -
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
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 -
There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
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