Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.
THOMAS HARDYMeasurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
More Thomas Hardy Quotes
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The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
THOMAS HARDY -
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
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 -
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
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 -
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 -
People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.
THOMAS HARDY -
So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.
THOMAS HARDY -
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
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 -
Our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.
THOMAS HARDY -
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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 -
Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
THOMAS HARDY -
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
THOMAS HARDY