Quotes by Thomas Hardy

About Thomas Hardy:

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

Thomas Hardy

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.

Thomas Hardy

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

Thomas Hardy

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Thomas Hardy

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

Thomas Hardy

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Thomas Hardy

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.

Thomas Hardy

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Thomas Hardy

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

Thomas Hardy

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Thomas Hardy

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Thomas Hardy

The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

Thomas Hardy

There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.

Thomas Hardy

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

Thomas Hardy

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thin...

Thomas Hardy

Author Bio

  • NameThomas Hardy
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist and poet
  • BornJune 2, 1840
  • DiedJanuary 11, 1928
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPoet; Writer; Novelist
  • WorksTess Of The D'Urbervilles; Far From The Madding Crowd; Jude The Obscure
  • AwardsOrder Of Merit