1840-1928, British Novelist, Poet
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.
Thomas Hardy – [Lovers]
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Thomas Hardy – [Respectability]
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
Thomas Hardy – [Royalty]
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Thomas Hardy – [Slang]
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 – [Proverbs]
Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.
Thomas Hardy – [Swearing]
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 – [Obscurity]
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 – [Faces]
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 – [Candor]
If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
Thomas Hardy – [Management]
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Thomas Hardy – [Language]
Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
Thomas Hardy – [World]
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
Thomas Hardy – [Contradiction]
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Thomas Hardy – [Custom]
Once victim, always victim — that's the law!
Thomas Hardy – [Victims]
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
Thomas Hardy – [Patience]
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 – [Pessimism]
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
Thomas Hardy – [Poetry and Poets]
Some folk want their luck buttered.
Thomas Hardy – [Luck]
That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
Thomas Hardy – [Silence]