Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet. Much of his literary work concerns the struggle of human beings against the unsympathetic force that inflicts the many sufferings and ironies of life.
Many of Hardy’s famous works are set in a semi-fictional ‘Wessex,’ which is based on his native Dorset. Hardy’s achievement teems with rich textures of local customs and regional folklore.
Born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, Hardy became an apprentice to an architect and spent his early twenties in London, where he began to write his first poems. He returned to Dorset and supplemented his architectural wages by writing novels, which were soon popular enough for him to take up writing full-time.
His first significant success was Far from the Madding Crowd (1874.) His subsequent tragic tales remain among the most widely read 19th-century novels and include The Return of the Native (1878,) The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886,) Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891,) and Jude the Obscure (1895.) Critics attacked the latter for its immoral tone, and, after that, Hardy devoted himself to poetry, including Wessex Poems (1898) and The Dynasts (1903–08.)
Hardy’s prolific output as a novelist often overshadows his consequent career as a poet. However, his intensely musical and movingly mournful poems, mostly written after the death of his first wife, expose unparalleled levels of emotional truth, helping his writing form a bridge between Victorianism and modernism in both fiction and poetry.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Hardy
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
—Thomas Hardy
That long drip of human tears.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Tears
If all hearts were open and all desires known—as they would be if people showed their souls—how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Candor, Sincerity
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfilment of that hope never entirely removes.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Hope, Disappointment, Expectation
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Language
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Heaven
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Language
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Faces, Face
Don’t you go believing in sayings, Picotee: they are all made by men, for their own advantages. Women who use public proverbs as a guide through events are those who have not ingenuity enough to make private ones as each event occurs.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Proverbs
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Lovers, Love
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Patience
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
Ethelberta breathed a sort of exclamation, not right out, but stealthily, like a parson’s damn.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Vulgarity, Profanity, Swearing
Yes; quaint and curious a war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half a crown.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: War
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Poets, Poetry
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Queens, Kings, Royalty
Some folk want their luck buttered.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Fortune, Luck
Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Pessimism
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Success
He had reached the time of life at which “young” ceases to be the prefix of man.
—Thomas Hardy
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Attitude, World, Earth
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
Topics: Age
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Morality
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Respect, Evil, Respectability
Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Integrity
Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be—and the non-necessity of it.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Science
Once victim, always victim—that’s the law.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Law, Injury
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Custom
That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Silence
Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although
He thought he
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: War
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