A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
Thomas Hardy

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Thomas Hardy

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
Thomas Hardy

And yet to every bad there is a worse.
Thomas Hardy

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
Thomas Hardy

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.
Thomas Hardy

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Thomas Hardy

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
Thomas Hardy

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

Fear is the mother of foresight.
Thomas Hardy


Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
Thomas Hardy

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
Thomas Hardy

I was court-martial in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Thomas Hardy

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
Thomas Hardy

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

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
Thomas Hardy

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
Thomas Hardy

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
Thomas Hardy