If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
THOMAS HARDYIf an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
More Thomas Hardy Quotes
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To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
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 -
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY -
You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.
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 -
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
THOMAS HARDY -
Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
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 -
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
THOMAS HARDY -
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
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 -
I wish I had never been born–there or anywhere else.
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 -
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
THOMAS HARDY -
All romances end at marriage.
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 -
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 -
O, you have torn my life all to pieces… made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
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