Thomas Hardy: Man

“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Source: The Return of the Native

“I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon…. O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing —
Not even I — would undo me so!”

Thomas Hardy

" The Going http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/2716" (1912), lines 38-42, from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

Soul , Dead

“Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.”

Thomas Hardy

" In Time of 'The Breaking Of Nations'" http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/poems/breaking.html (1915), lines 1-12, from Moments of Vision (1917); the title is derived from lines of Jeremiah 51:20: "Thou art my battle ax and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations."
Context: p>Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.</p

Horse

“A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.”

Thomas Hardy

Silence

“Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail…”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

Success , Selfishness

“Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Fate , Indifference

“The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be only partially before his time—to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

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

World , Time

“Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Ch. 1

“It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

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

Hate , Nature , Solitude , Personality

“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

“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

“I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.”

Thomas Hardy book The Hand of Ethelberta

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 20

Stupidity

“When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things?"”

Thomas Hardy

" Afterwards http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Hardy/Afterwards.htm", lines 1-4, from Moments of Vision (1917)