Thomas Hardy

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.

She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.

Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.

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

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

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

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

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

The defective can be more than the entire.

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.

Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.

I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.