A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
– Thomas Hardy
A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
– Thomas Hardy
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, in blast-beruffled plume.
– Thomas Hardy
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
– Thomas Hardy
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
– Thomas Hardy
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
– Thomas Hardy
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.
– Thomas Hardy
Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson's damn.
– Thomas Hardy
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
– Thomas Hardy
Fear is the mother of foresight.
– Thomas Hardy
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
– Thomas Hardy
Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.
– Thomas Hardy
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
– Thomas Hardy
I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
– Thomas Hardy
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
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
– Thomas Hardy
If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
– Thomas Hardy
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
– Thomas Hardy
Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
– Thomas Hardy
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
– Thomas Hardy
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
– Thomas Hardy
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
– Thomas Hardy
Once victim, always victim - that's the law!
– Thomas Hardy
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
– Thomas Hardy
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
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
– Thomas Hardy
Some folk want their luck buttered.
– Thomas Hardy
The excessive regard of parents for their children, and their dislike of other people's is, like class feeling, patriotism, save-your-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.
– Thomas Hardy
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
– Thomas Hardy
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
– Thomas Hardy
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
– Thomas Hardy
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
There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
– Thomas Hardy
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
– Thomas Hardy
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
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.
– Thomas Hardy
You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.
– Thomas Hardy
You was a good man, and did good things.
– Thomas Hardy
A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
– Thomas Hardy
My argument is that War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.
– Thomas Hardy
Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society and we can't get out of it if we would.