857 Quotes by Thomas Hardy

Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with trouble.

The ‘appetite for joy’ which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the ride sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.

Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

It was still early, and the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.

The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility.

I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know.

To be conscious that the end of a dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.