Thomas Hardy Quotes

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

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.

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

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.

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.