Quotes from Thomas Hardy

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

She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

Fear is the mother of foresight.

Patience that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

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

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

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

War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.

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

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

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.

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

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

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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