You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.
THOMAS HARDYMany have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
More Thomas Hardy Quotes
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Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
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 -
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 is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.
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 -
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
THOMAS HARDY -
Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
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 -
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
THOMAS HARDY -
She moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
THOMAS HARDY -
That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY -
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.
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 -
I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
THOMAS HARDY -
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
THOMAS HARDY -
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
THOMAS HARDY -
Silence 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.
THOMAS HARDY -
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
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 -
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 -
Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
THOMAS HARDY -
If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
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 -
She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.
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 -
The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
THOMAS HARDY