Quotes from Thomas Hardy

Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

That long drip of human tears.

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

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

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

Fear is the mother of foresight.

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

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

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskillful 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.

Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,In blast-beruffled plume.

Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walkWith an old horse that stumbles and nodsHalf asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flameFrom the heaps of couch grass:Yet this will go onward the sameThough dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wightCome whispering by;War's annals will cloud into nightEre their story die.

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.

What of the Immanent Will and its designs?It works unconsciously as heretofore,External artistries in circumstance.

And meadow rivulets overflow,And drops on gate bars hang in a row,And rooks in families homeward go,And so do I.

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strownBlisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

That night your great guns, unawares,Shook all our coffins as we lay,And broke the chancel window-squares,We thought it was the Judgment Day.

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

So little cause for carolingsOf such ecstatic soundWas written on terrestrial thingsAfar or nigh around,That I could think there trembled throughHis happy good-night airSome blessed hope, whereof he knewAnd I was unaware.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.

Done because we are too menny.

What of the faith and fire within usMen who march awayEre the barn cocks sayNight is growing gray,Leaving all that here can win us.