Thomas Hardy - Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

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

Thomas Hardy
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
Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a line - less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

Thomas Hardy
He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

Thomas Hardy
To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

Thomas Hardy
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

Thomas Hardy
There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.

Thomas Hardy
We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.

Thomas Hardy
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

Thomas Hardy
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

Thomas Hardy
It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.

Thomas Hardy
Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.

Thomas Hardy
And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak

Thomas Hardy
George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Thomas Hardy
A man's body is as the shell, or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained.

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

Thomas Hardy
In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

Thomas Hardy
Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

Thomas Hardy
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

Thomas Hardy
Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.

Thomas Hardy
Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.

Thomas Hardy
It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides.

Thomas Hardy
I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

Thomas Hardy
Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

Thomas Hardy
The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

Thomas Hardy
The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.

Thomas Hardy
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