Thomas Hardy Quotes

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

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.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

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.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

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.

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

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.

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

All romances end at marriage.

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.