Quotes from Thomas Hardy

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

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

We two kept house, the Past and I,The Past and I;Through all my tasks it hovered nigh,Leaving me never alone.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,And so do I.

Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might Which fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight.

And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened, and little things 'a didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will be as nothing!

I leant upon a coppice gateWhen Frost was specter-gray,And Winter's dregs made desolateThe weakening eye of day.

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted." "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one.

And as the smart ship grewIn stature, grace, and hue,In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

That cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

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

When I set out for Lyonnesse,A hundred miles away,The rime was on the spray,And starlight lit my lonesomeness.

Truth bends abashed, and answers not.

Good, but not religious-good.

A local cult called Christianity.

The hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance, except, perhaps, fair play.

I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on.

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

Ah, no; the years, the years;Down their chiseled names the raindrop plows.

The sky was clear — remarkably clear — and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from the one who was all to me,But as at first, when our day was fair.

But sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience.

A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.