Thomas Hardy

"My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker."

"People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort."

"It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays--I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!"

"To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars."

"You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them."

"Fear is the mother of foresight."

"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change."

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

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

"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."

"Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity."

"Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art."

"The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes."

"Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel."

"That man's silence is wonderful to listen to."

"There is a good deal too strange to be believed nothing is too strange to have happened."

"If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved the Inquisition might have let him alone."

"Patience that blending of moral courage with physical timidity."

"A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all."

"Some folk want their luck buttered."