857 Quotes by Thomas Hardy

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

This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.

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

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.

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

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. "Now they are all on their knees," An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearth-side ease. We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! yet, I feel If someone said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel, In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know," I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.