Thomas Hardy's Quotes

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

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

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

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

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

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

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

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

Some folk want their luck buttered.

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.

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

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.

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

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

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

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.

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

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.

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

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

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

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

You was a good man, and did good things.

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

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