Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
THOMAS HARDYYou, 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!
More Thomas Hardy Quotes
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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 -
Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
THOMAS HARDY -
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
THOMAS HARDY -
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
THOMAS HARDY -
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
THOMAS HARDY -
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
THOMAS HARDY -
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
THOMAS HARDY -
You have never loved me as I love you–never–never! Yours is not a passionate heart–your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite– not a woman!
THOMAS HARDY -
All romances end at marriage.
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 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 -
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
THOMAS HARDY -
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
THOMAS HARDY -
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
THOMAS HARDY -
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
THOMAS HARDY -
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
THOMAS HARDY -
Our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.
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 -
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 -
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
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 -
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 -
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 -
You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.
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 offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
THOMAS HARDY