134 quotes
Ere systemed suns were globed and lit
The slaughters of the race were writ.
The Dynasts (1904)
Since as a child I used to lie
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.
Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928)
You may prate of your prowess in lusty times,
But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays,
And see too well your crimes!
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
Time's Laughingstocks (1909)
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land,
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
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.
The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930)
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
Thou should’st have learnt that Not to Mend
For Me could mean but Not to Know.
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
Here by the baring bough
Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
Springtime deceives,—
I, an old woman now,
Raking up leaves.
Time's Laughingstocks (1909)
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
What of the Immanent Will and its designs?
It works unconsciously as heretofore,
External artistries in circumstance.
The Dynasts (1904)
I saw a dead man’s finer part
Shining within each faithful heart
Of those bereft. Then said I: 'This must be
His immortality.'
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.
Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928)
All romances end at marriage.
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
Satires of Circumstance (1914)
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.
Jude the Obscure (1895)
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
He lookèd from his loft one day
To where his slighted garden lay;
Nettles and hemlock hid each lawn,
And every flower was starved and gone.
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.
Moments of Vision (1917)
In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
And the roof-lamp's oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came.
Satires of Circumstance (1914)