Quotes by Hardy, Thomas

"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."

Hardy, Thomas on age and aging   

"I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion."

Hardy, Thomas on faces   

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

Hardy, Thomas on heaven   

"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs."

Hardy, Thomas on language
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"A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms."

Hardy, Thomas on love
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"Some folk want their luck buttered."

Hardy, Thomas on luck   

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"If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst."

Hardy, Thomas on management   

"Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity."

Hardy, Thomas on obscurity   

"Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity."

Hardy, Thomas on patience
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"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."

Hardy, Thomas on pessimism   

"Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art."

Hardy, Thomas on poetry and poets   

"Don't you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs."

Hardy, Thomas on proverbs   

"A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible."

Hardy, Thomas on respectability   

"Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king."

Hardy, Thomas on royalty   

"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."

Hardy, Thomas on science   

"That man's silence is wonderful to listen to."

Hardy, Thomas on silence   

"Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel."

Hardy, Thomas on slang   

"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!"

Hardy, Thomas on candor   

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

Hardy, Thomas on surprises
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"Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn."

Hardy, Thomas on swearing   

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"Once victim, always victim -- that's the law!"

Hardy, Thomas on victims   

"Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight."

Hardy, Thomas on world   

"Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle."

Hardy, Thomas on contradiction   

"Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them."

Hardy, Thomas on custom   

"And yet to every bad there's a worse."

Hardy, Thomas on problems