857 Quotes by Thomas Hardy

To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.

War makes rattling good history.

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.

...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

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!

Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it, / And pay a million priests to bring it. / After two thousand years of mass / We've got as far as poison-gas.

I. At Tea THE kettle descants in a cosy drone, And the young wife looks in her husband's face, And then in her guest's, and shows in her own Her sense that she fills an envied place; And the visiting lady is all abloom, And says there was never so sweet a room. And the happy young housewife does not know That the woman beside her was his first choice, Till the fates ordained it could not be so.... Betraying nothing in look or voice The guest sits smiling and sips her tea, And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.

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.

Who's in the next room? - who? / I seemed to see / Somebody in the dawning passing through,/ Unknown to me.