“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
PinTime changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.PinThough a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.PinWomen are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.PinTo find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.
“With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.”
Thomas Hardy
PinThey spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.PinLet not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.PinAnd yet to every bad there is a worse.PinPoetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
20 Thought-Provoking Thomas Hardy Quotes
“Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be — and the non-necessity of it.”
Thomas Hardy
PinFear is the mother of foresight.PinThere is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn’t there.
“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.”
Thomas Hardy
PinIf an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.PinA man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
“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
PinI want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.PinThe business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.PinWar makes good history but peace is poor reading.PinEverybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.PinSilence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.PinSo 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.PinIt is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.PinOur impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.PinRemember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man.PinLet me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.PinPatience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.PinIt was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.PinWe colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
7 Profound Thomas Hardy Quotes About Life
“We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.”
Thomas Hardy
PinThe sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.PinDo not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.PinSome folk want their luck buttered.PinMeasurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.PinA resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.PinI won’t be a slave to the past. I’ll love where I choose.
9 Thomas Hardy Quotes on Love
“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.”
Thomas Hardy
PinLove is a possible strength in an actual weakness.PinI shall do one thing in this life – one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.
“You have never loved me as I love you–never–never! Yours is not a passionate heart, Your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite, not a woman!”
Thomas Hardy
PinSee what deceits love sows in honest minds!PinA lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
“To be loved to madness–such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”
Thomas Hardy
PinWell, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
“You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posses half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.”
Thomas Hardy
11 Thomas Hardy Quotes on Women
“Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.”
Thomas Hardy
PinA strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.PinIt is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
“I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don’t know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man’s heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go unlamented to her grave.”
Thomas Hardy
PinDid it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?PinWhy is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?PinLadies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.PinA woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.PinThe perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.PinWomen accept their destiny more readily than men.PinShe was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.
3 Thomas Hardy Quotes on Marriage
“People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.”
Thomas Hardy
PinWell, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.PinIf we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do. If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
2 Thomas Hardy Quotes on Beauty
PinThe beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.PinBeauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
2 Thomas Hardy Quotes on Nature
PinTo dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.PinThe 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.
2 Thomas Hardy Quotes on Happiness
“There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.”
Thomas Hardy
PinHappiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
17 Thomas Hardy Quotes That Will Make You Think
“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.”
Thomas Hardy
PinIf way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.PinThe main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
“Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die…”
Thomas Hardy
PinYou can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.PinIf Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.PinBut no one came. Because no one ever does.PinAnd at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up, there will be you.PinSometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.PinThis hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?PinDialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.PinAspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.PinLike the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.PinOnce victim, always victim — that’s the law!PinShe’s never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he is now!PinBut his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.PinMy eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
![The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.](https://cdn.graciousquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/The-perfect-woman-you-see-is-a-working-woman-not-an-idler-not-a-fine-lady-but-one-who-uses-her-hands-and-her-head-and-her-heart-for-the-good-of-others..jpg)
