Quotes from Thomas Hardy

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

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

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

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

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

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

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

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

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

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

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

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.

Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.

Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.

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

Love lives on propinquity but dies on contact.

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.

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....

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.

I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!