Quotes By Thomas Hardy

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.

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

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

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.

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

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

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.

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

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.

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

You was a good man, and did good things.

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

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.