Thomas Hardy
140 quotes
Biography
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist, poet and architect. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth.
"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."
"Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness."
"Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle."
"Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed"as some amiable theorists would have us believe."
"That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!"
"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change."
"To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience."
"With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever."
"It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian – the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew."
"To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall."
"Good, but not religious-good."
"For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease."
"Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture."
"The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement."
"Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants."
"And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up, there will be you."
"A nice unparticular man."
"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs."
"Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more."
"Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them."
"A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms."
"You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!"
"I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity."
"Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor."
"In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale."