Quotes by "Thomas Hardy"

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

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

Love lives on propinquity, but dies on contact.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

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

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

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then--I don't know how it was-- I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.

I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don't know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man's heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go unlamented to her grave.

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

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

Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.

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

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.

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