857 Quotes by Thomas Hardy

But what is Wisdom really? A steady handling of any means to bring about any end necessary to happiness. Yet whether one’s end be the usual end – a wealthy position in life – or no, the name of wisdom is seldom applied but to the means to that usual end.

Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?

Of all the ingenious and cruel satires that from the beginning till now have been stuck like knives into womankind, surely there is not one so lacerating to them, and to us who love them, as the trite old fact, that the most wretched of men can, in the twinkling of an eye, find a wife ready to be more wretched still for the sake of his company. Edward hastened to despatch his.

Eustacia, I don’t know where to look: my thoughts go through me like swords.

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

Perhaps you are making a cat’s paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems so – to see you sitting up there so prim.

They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them.

Had Philip’s warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilisation without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed; but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.

Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.