Thomas Hardy Quotes

If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.

Patience that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.

I hate to be what is called a clever girl—there are too many of that sort now!

She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.

I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!

Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.