Quotes of Thomas Hardy - somelinesforyou

“ Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. ”

- Thomas Hardy

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

- Thomas Hardy

“ That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ The beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passionthe craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the manwas in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And thenI don't know how it was I couldn't bear to let you gopossibly to Arabella againand so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ 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. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ 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

“ Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only selfreliant women love when they abandon their selfreliance. 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. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weepingnot from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his greataunt for life. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ So do flux and refluxthe rhythm of changealternate and persist in everything under the sky. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ So do flux and refluxthe rhythm of changealternate and persist in everything under the sky. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime! ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and timeeaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ Let truth be told women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ Love begins with a sense of superior discernment. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ Between himself and her there was that kind of division which is more insurmountable than enmity; for estrangements produced by good judgment will last when those of feeling break down in smiles. Not the lovers who part in passion, but the lovers who part in friendship, are those who most frequently part forever. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ New love is brightest, and long love is greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mindmonsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison." What monsters may they be?" Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their interspaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky... In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on!... There is a size at which dignity begins," he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror? ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with themone or two of them particularly almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feelto be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man no man short of a sensual savagewill molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. ”

- Thomas Hardy

“ I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with themone or two of them particularly almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feelto be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man no man short of a sensual savagewill molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. ”

- Thomas Hardy
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