Quotes By Thomas Hardy

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

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

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.

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

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

Some folk want their luck buttered.

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

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

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

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

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

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.

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

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

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

Fear is the mother of foresight.

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

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.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

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

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

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

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

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

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

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.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.