The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfilment of that hope never entirely removes.
THOMAS HARDY, James Gibson's Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life
The beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit.
THOMAS HARDY, Desperate Remedies
War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
THOMAS HARDY, The Dynasts
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
THOMAS HARDY, Far from the Madding Crowd
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, letter, Jul. 8, 1901
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY, The Hand of Ethelberta
It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it.
THOMAS HARDY, Far from the Madding Crowd
Pessimism ... is, in brief, playing the sure game ... It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed.
THOMAS HARDY, note, Jan. 1, 1902
Some folk want their luck buttered.
THOMAS HARDY, The Mayor of Castorbridge
There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct -- not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.
THOMAS HARDY, Far from the Madding Crowd
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
THOMAS HARDY, Tess of the d'Urbervilles
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.
THOMAS HARDY, "Heredity"
A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
THOMAS HARDY, The Return of the Native
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