Thomas Hardy

You was a good man, and did good things.

The beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit.

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began in which emotion was the matter of the universe and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

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

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

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.

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

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

The perfect woman, you see is a working woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who uses her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

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

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

Clouds spout upon her / Their waters amain / In ruthless disdain, – / Her who but lately / Had shivered with pain / As at touch of dishonour / If there had lit on her / So coldly, so straightly / Such arrows of rain

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

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

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

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

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

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

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

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

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

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

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.

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

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

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

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find To equal among human kind A dog's fidelity!

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.

And at home by the fire whenever you look up there I shall be and whenever I look up there will be you.

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

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

Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.

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

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

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

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.

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

Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

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

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

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

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

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed.

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

To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonths regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance to pass to marriage without courtship is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

Fear is the mother of foresight.

It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself and extemporize a procedure to fit it than to get a good plan matured and wait for a chance of using it.

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society and we cant 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.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

The perfect woman, you see is a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who uses her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

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

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.