Thomas Hardy: Trending quotes (page 7)

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“Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody's hand!”

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. 41

“How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?”

Thomas Hardy book Tess of the d'Urbervilles

phase the Sixth: The Convert, ch. XLVI
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

World

“But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that.”

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. 44

Wisdom , God , Way , Departure

“To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.”

Thomas Hardy

Statement (5 August 1888), as quoted in The life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (1962) by Florence Emily Hardy

Beauty

“When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. V, ch. 2
The Return of the Native (1878)

Life , Change

“And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!"”

Thomas Hardy

And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.</p>
"The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic), lines 22-33

History

“It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian – the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew.”

Thomas Hardy

Desperate Remedies (1871), vol. 2, ch. 4

Love , Books

“And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!”

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. 18

Way

“Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more.”

Thomas Hardy book The Hand of Ethelberta

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 1

“Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Pt. I, ch. XI
Jude the Obscure (1895)

Error , Feeling

“The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. I, ch. 1
The Return of the Native (1878)

Sleep , Appearance

“The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.”

Thomas Hardy

<p>This quote can be traced to two authors, in books published within the same year:</p><p>1) Rev. Edward John Hardy, known as E.J. Hardy (1849-1920), How to Be Happy Though Civil: A Book on Manners (New York, Scribners, 1909), ch. VI: A Christian Gentleman;
2) John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, Peace and Happiness (Macmillan, 1909), ch. XV: Religion</p>
Misattributed

Religion

“Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.”

Thomas Hardy

" During Wind and Rain http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/96.html", lines 27-28, from Moments of Vision (1917)

“The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.”

Thomas Hardy

Quoted in The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), by Florence Emily Hardy, ch. 17, p. 212

Men , Age , Dependency , Personality

“How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. V, ch. 3
The Return of the Native (1878)

“Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: " The Voice http://www.portablepoetry.com/poems/thomas_hardy/the_voice.html" (1912), lines 1-4, from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

Change

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

Thomas Hardy book The Hand of Ethelberta

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 2

“The heath and changes of weather were quite blotted out from their eyes for the present. They were enclosed in a sort of luminous mist, which hid from them surroundings of any inharmonious colour, and gave to all things the character of light. When it rained they were charmed, because they could remain indoors together all day with such a show of reason; when it was fine they were charmed, because they could sit together on the hills. They were like those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. IV, ch. 1
The Return of the Native (1878)

Star , Light , Appearance , Change

“She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind — or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.”

Thomas Hardy book Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Phase the Second: Maiden No More, ch. XIII
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

World , Fear , Idea

“Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live for—that's all is the matter with me!”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. II, ch. 4
The Return of the Native (1878)