Thomas Hardy Quotes

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

So do flux and reflux-the rhythm of change-alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

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.

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

But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is.

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

A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

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!

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

If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.

I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.

Well, if you wanted to love me, why do you blow so hot and cold?
Why do you... keep tantalizing me?
I tell you, Tess, I'd take you for a flirt,
For a sit you could catch,
If I didn't know just honest and pure you are." Angel

She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.

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.

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

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

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

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.