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Age
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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.
-Thomas Hardy
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Contradiction
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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
-Thomas Hardy
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Customs
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Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
-Thomas Hardy
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Earth
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Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
-Thomas Hardy
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Expectation
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The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
-Thomas Hardy
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Face, Faces
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I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
-Thomas Hardy
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Heaven
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The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
-Thomas Hardy
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Hurt, Injury
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Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!
-Thomas Hardy
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Language
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Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
-Thomas Hardy
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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
-Thomas Hardy
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Love
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A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.
-Thomas Hardy
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Luck
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Some folk want their luck buttered.
-Thomas Hardy
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Management
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If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
-Thomas Hardy
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Obscurity
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Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
-Thomas Hardy
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Patience
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There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place. The single fat thing on the soil was Marian herself; and she was an importation. Of the three classes of village, the village cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in other words, the village of a resident squires's tenantry, the village of free or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village, farmed with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.
But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel Clare; and it sustained her.
-Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 1891
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Pessimism
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Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.
-Thomas Hardy
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Poetry
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Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
-Thomas Hardy
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.
-Thomas Hardy
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Proverbial Wisdom
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Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs.
-Thomas Hardy
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Respect
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A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
-Thomas Hardy
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Royalty, Kings, Queens
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Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
-Thomas Hardy
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Science
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Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it.
-Thomas Hardy
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Silence
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That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
-Thomas Hardy
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Sincerity
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If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!
-Thomas Hardy
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Surprise
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
-Thomas Hardy
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Books by and about Thomas Hardy