Thomas Hardy Quotes

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

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.

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.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

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.