Quotes by Thomas Hardy

“He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.”

“We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.”

“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 ...”

“A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”

“Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?”

“A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.”

“She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.”

“Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas ...”

“Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?”

“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.”

“[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had p...”

“When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

“Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?”

“Some womens love of being loved is insatiable ; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they cant give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by th...”

“My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.”

“A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.”

“How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as dee...”

“She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.”

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