134 quotes
Done because we are too menny.
Jude the Obscure (1895)
Still rule those minds on earth
At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled:
‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
Is your heart far away,
Or with mine beating?
When false things are brought low,
And swift things have grown slow,
Feigning like froth shall go,
Faith be for aye.
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake.
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
When Lawyers strive to heal a breach,
And Parsons practise what they preach.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
O fatuous man, this truth infer,
Brides are not what they seem;
Thou lovest what thou dreamest her;
I am thy very dream!
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
But the disease of feeling germed,
And primal rightness took the tinct of wrong;
Ere nescience shall be reaffirmed
How long, how long?
Before Life and After (1909)
Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.
The Return of the Native (1878)
I give the story as I heard it, my lady, but be dazed if I believe in such trumpery behaviour of the folks in the sky, nor anything else that's said about 'em.
Two on Tower (1882)
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.
Moments of Vision (1917)
Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
We two kept house, the Past and I,
The Past and I;
I tended while it hovered nigh,
Leaving me never alone.
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance.
The Dynasts (1904)
It surely is far sweeter and more wise
To water love, than toil to leave anon
A name whose glory-gleam will but advise
Invidious minds to quench it with their own.
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
As newer comers crowd the fore,
We drop behind.
—We who have laboured long and sore
Times out of mind,
And keen are yet, must not regret
To drop behind.
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
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.
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that.
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian – the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew.
Desperate Remedies (1871)
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.