Thomas Hardy Quotes - Page 3

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

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.

It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

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.

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.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

The defective can be more than the entire.

That aspects are within us; and who seems Most kingly is the King.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak

...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

Always wanting another man than your own.

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.

I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order

You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.

He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.

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.

WEATHERS This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly; And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at 'The Traveller's Rest,' And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I. This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I; When beeches drip in browns and duns, And thresh and ply; And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe, And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!