857 Quotes by Thomas Hardy

Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary.

After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again – to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them;.

But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines.

It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete.

Hang it, I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there’s nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t either.

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that’s saying a good deal.

The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression.

There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba’s; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel’s.