Thomas Hardy quotes - page 8

Perhaps, I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion - hard as a rock - which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting. If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. (Thomas Hardy)
Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. View quote
Thomas Hardy
War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die. View quote
Thomas Hardy
Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied sould of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way to say a little is often to tell more than to say. View quote
Thomas Hardy
But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one. View quote
Thomas Hardy
I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman's moments. View quote
Thomas Hardy
The doctor says there are such boys springing up amongst us-boys of a sort unknown in the last generation-the outcome of new views of life. They seem to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying power to resist them. He says it is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live. View quote
Thomas Hardy
What of the Immanent Will and Its designs? It works unconsciously, as heretofore, Eternal artistries in Circumstance. View quote
Thomas Hardy
And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history,Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event,Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" View quote
Thomas Hardy
There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there. View quote
Thomas Hardy
You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. (Thomas Hardy)
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. View quote
Thomas Hardy
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own. View quote
Thomas Hardy
Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would. View quote
Thomas Hardy
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it. View quote
Thomas Hardy
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure. View quote
Thomas Hardy
I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else. View quote
Thomas Hardy
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet. View quote
Thomas Hardy
George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day-another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise. View quote
Thomas Hardy
There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration. View quote
Thomas Hardy
It was that period in the vernal quarter when we may suppose the Dryads to be waking for the season. The vegetable world begins to move and swell and the saps to rise, till in the completest silence of lone gardens and trackless plantations, where everything seems helpless and still after the bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts. (Thomas Hardy)
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new. View quote
Thomas Hardy
But no one came. Because no one ever does. View quote
Thomas Hardy
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world. View quote
Thomas Hardy
Always wanting another man than your own. View quote
Thomas Hardy