Quotes by Thomas Hardy

• Fear is the mother of foresight.
• I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
• A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
• I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
• If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
• Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.
• Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
• If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
• Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
• Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
• And yet to every bad there is a worse.
• A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
• A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
• It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
• Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
• 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.
• Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
• You was a good man, and did good things.
• You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.
• 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.
• There 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.
• The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
• The 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.
• The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
• The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
• Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
• Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
• Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.
• My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
• No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
• My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
• 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.
• Some folk want their luck buttered.
• That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
• The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
• Life is too important to be taken seriously, so laugh often and embrace the chaos.