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Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Thomas Hardy

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Thomas Hardy
Age: 87 †
Born: 1840
Born: June 2
Died: 1928
Died: January 28
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Dorset
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Custom
Moral
Morals
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Poets
Manners
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More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
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Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess? Yes. All like ours? I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted. Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one? A blighted one.
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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
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you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
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Bless thy simplicity, Tess
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It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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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
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To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.
Thomas Hardy
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You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
Thomas Hardy
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Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
Thomas Hardy
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If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
Thomas Hardy
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Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
Thomas Hardy
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Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
Thomas Hardy
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Done because we are too many.
Thomas Hardy
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We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
Thomas Hardy
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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
Thomas Hardy
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Some women's love of being loved is insatiable and so, often, is their love of loving and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.
Thomas Hardy
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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy