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

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
Contradiction
Principle
British
Constitution
Principles
Practice
Inconsistencies
Success
Inconsistency
Like
Owes

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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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
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Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
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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I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on.
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you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Thomas Hardy
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There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
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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We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
Thomas Hardy
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That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
Thomas Hardy
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A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
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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Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Thomas Hardy
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We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.
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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It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
Thomas Hardy
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Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
Thomas Hardy
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If we be doomed to marry, we marry if we be doomed to remain single we do.
Thomas Hardy
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Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Thomas Hardy