The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
THOMAS HARDYEverybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
More Thomas Hardy Quotes
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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
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 -
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 -
The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
THOMAS HARDY -
There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
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 -
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 -
You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.
THOMAS HARDY -
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
THOMAS HARDY -
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
THOMAS HARDY -
It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.
THOMAS HARDY -
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
THOMAS HARDY -
Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
THOMAS HARDY -
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
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 -
Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
THOMAS HARDY -
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
THOMAS HARDY -
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
THOMAS HARDY -
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 HARDY -
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
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 -
Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
THOMAS HARDY -
Many 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.
THOMAS HARDY -
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
THOMAS HARDY -
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.
THOMAS HARDY -
It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.
THOMAS HARDY