Thomas Hardy quote: "Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another."

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never ...
THOMAS HARDY

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
THOMAS HARDY

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in ...
THOMAS HARDY

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
THOMAS HARDY

Tess's feminine hope - shall we confess it - had been so obstinately recuperative as to revive in he...
THOMAS HARDY

I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.
THOMAS HARDY

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never...
THOMAS HARDY

At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me....
THOMAS HARDY

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonize...
THOMAS HARDY

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfe...
THOMAS HARDY

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only v...
THOMAS HARDY

There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place. The s...
THOMAS HARDY

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
THOMAS HARDY

Some folk want their luck buttered.
THOMAS HARDY

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to expre...
THOMAS HARDY

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
THOMAS HARDY

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired...
THOMAS HARDY

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

If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- ho...
THOMAS HARDY

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

Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.
THOMAS HARDY

Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveli...
THOMAS HARDY

Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!
THOMAS HARDY

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction...
THOMAS HARDY

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times an...
THOMAS HARDY

Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the...
THOMAS HARDY

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
THOMAS HARDY

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
THOMAS HARDY

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
THOMAS HARDY

Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Wome...
THOMAS HARDY

Man, without religion, is the creature of circumstances.
THOMAS HARDY

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance...
THOMAS HARDY

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
THOMAS HARDY

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
THOMAS HARDY

A lover without discretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY

...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes
THOMAS HARDY

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

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

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than ca...
THOMAS HARDY

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after...
THOMAS HARDY

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little p...
THOMAS HARDY

In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us...
THOMAS HARDY

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidan...
THOMAS HARDY

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.
THOMAS HARDY

If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- ...
THOMAS HARDY

Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the l...
THOMAS HARDY

You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to mak...
THOMAS HARDY

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

But you shouldn't have let her. That's the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high--innoce...
THOMAS HARDY

You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
THOMAS HARDY

I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!
THOMAS HARDY

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honour as deserving real distincti...
THOMAS HARDY

A lover without discretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only...
THOMAS HARDY

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY

Fear is the mother of foresight.
THOMAS HARDY

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
THOMAS HARDY

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is ...
THOMAS HARDY

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many ...
THOMAS HARDY

I shall be breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.
THOMAS HARDY

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness ha...
THOMAS HARDY

There's not a modest maiden elf / But dreads the final Trumpet, / Lest half of her should rise herse...
THOMAS HARDY

I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot ...
THOMAS HARDY

Silent? ah, he is silent! He can keep silence well. That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY

The excessive regard of parents for their children, and their dislike of other people's is, like cla...
THOMAS HARDY

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

The bower we shrined to Tennyson, / Gentlemen, / Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon / Sagged sea...
THOMAS HARDY

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world east...
THOMAS HARDY

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and tha...
THOMAS HARDY

I have been looking for god for fifty years and I think if he had existed I should have discovered h...
THOMAS HARDY

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
THOMAS HARDY

Where once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, / The floors are shrunken, cobwebs hang.
THOMAS HARDY

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would
THOMAS HARDY

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

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it, / And pay a million priests to bring it. / After two thous...
THOMAS HARDY

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidan...
THOMAS HARDY

I am the family face; / Flesh perishes, I live on, / Projecting trait and trace / Through time to ti...
THOMAS HARDY

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity
THOMAS HARDY

I need not go / Through sleet and snow / To where I know / She waits for me: / She will tarry there ...
THOMAS HARDY

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
THOMAS HARDY

The sky was clear -- remarkably clear -- and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs ...
THOMAS HARDY

This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better...
THOMAS HARDY

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them th...
THOMAS HARDY

The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.
THOMAS HARDY

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wander...
THOMAS HARDY

Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be...
THOMAS HARDY

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all...
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; ...
THOMAS HARDY

There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we be...
THOMAS HARDY

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
THOMAS HARDY

This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortu...
THOMAS HARDY

Women are never tired of bewailing man’s fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his consta...
THOMAS HARDY

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or...
THOMAS HARDY

Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and...
THOMAS HARDY

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter...
THOMAS HARDY

Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who k...
THOMAS HARDY

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
THOMAS HARDY

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will...
THOMAS HARDY

--the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil th...
THOMAS HARDY

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almo...
THOMAS HARDY

Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and incon...
THOMAS HARDY

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects...
THOMAS HARDY

...who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been melted into it when in a liquid state, ...
THOMAS HARDY

Her suspense was terrible.
THOMAS HARDY

If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard ...
THOMAS HARDY

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substi...
THOMAS HARDY

The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very...
THOMAS HARDY

With peace of mind came development, and with development beauty. Knowledge—the result of great na...
THOMAS HARDY

Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of...
THOMAS HARDY

And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, an...
THOMAS HARDY

Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year roun...
THOMAS HARDY

There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance int...
THOMAS HARDY

He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon.
THOMAS HARDY

The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a deli...
THOMAS HARDY

The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by t...
THOMAS HARDY

If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now!
THOMAS HARDY

He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not reall...
THOMAS HARDY

The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so...
THOMAS HARDY

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.
THOMAS HARDY

It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.
THOMAS HARDY

Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in s...
THOMAS HARDY

Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.
THOMAS HARDY

She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.
THOMAS HARDY

Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed o...
THOMAS HARDY

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time ...
THOMAS HARDY

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a bri...
THOMAS HARDY

She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes a...
THOMAS HARDY

Some folks want their luck buttered.
THOMAS HARDY

In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked that she was, and forgot that the defective can more...
THOMAS HARDY

Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits w...
THOMAS HARDY

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?
THOMAS HARDY

You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any ...
THOMAS HARDY

He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, ...
THOMAS HARDY

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to exp...
THOMAS HARDY

Rural solitude, which provides ample themes for the intellect and sweet occupations innumerable for ...
THOMAS HARDY

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
THOMAS HARDY

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
THOMAS HARDY

Christmas Eve Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. "Now they are all on their knees," An elder...
THOMAS HARDY

War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
THOMAS HARDY

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourse...
THOMAS HARDY

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
THOMAS HARDY

So little cause for carolings / Of such ecstatic sound / Was written on terrestrial things / Afar or...
THOMAS HARDY

Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in nois...
THOMAS HARDY

So zestfully canst thou sing? / And all this indignity, / With God's consent, on thee! / Blinded ere...
THOMAS HARDY

Perhaps you are making a cat's paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems...
THOMAS HARDY

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably u...
THOMAS HARDY

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and tha...
THOMAS HARDY

But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed ang...
THOMAS HARDY

I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the...
THOMAS HARDY

It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vice...
THOMAS HARDY

I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them parti...
THOMAS HARDY

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observ...
THOMAS HARDY

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as...
THOMAS HARDY

What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?"

"Yes, dearest," he sa...
THOMAS HARDY

Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now a...
THOMAS HARDY

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much o...
THOMAS HARDY

...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contin...
THOMAS HARDY

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
THOMAS HARDY

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but hersel...
THOMAS HARDY

Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do...
THOMAS HARDY

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

Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth ...
THOMAS HARDY

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, th...
THOMAS HARDY

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality...
THOMAS HARDY

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere...
THOMAS HARDY

Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about [history] than I know already. [...] Becau...
THOMAS HARDY

I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only ...
THOMAS HARDY

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

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
THOMAS HARDY

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses...
THOMAS HARDY

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…
THOMAS HARDY

Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard again...
THOMAS HARDY

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but ...
THOMAS HARDY

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

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

You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. A...
THOMAS HARDY

...it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall b...
THOMAS HARDY

The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views up...
THOMAS HARDY

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial inte...
THOMAS HARDY

you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom--hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I al...
THOMAS HARDY

Had other aims than my delight.
THOMAS HARDY

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
THOMAS HARDY

Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line -- less dir...
THOMAS HARDY

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements...
THOMAS HARDY

On a Fine Morning”
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

WHENCE comes Solac...
THOMAS HARDY

The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of...
THOMAS HARDY

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or ...
THOMAS HARDY

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the...
THOMAS HARDY

The beggarly question of parentage--what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to thi...
THOMAS HARDY

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
THOMAS HARDY

He had just reached the time of life at which 'young' is ceasing to be the prefix of 'man' in speaki...
THOMAS HARDY

But no one came. Because no one ever does.
THOMAS HARDY

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
THOMAS HARDY

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the cou...
THOMAS HARDY

And yet to every bad there is a worse.
THOMAS HARDY

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY

Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
THOMAS HARDY

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-relia...
THOMAS HARDY

Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.

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Thomas Hardy

Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.

Thomas Hardy

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