Thomas Hardy Quotes

People make fast moves around me, I react. I can't help it.

Nothing in the fact that there was a first moment in time necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment.

It is impossible to be submissive and religiously patient, if ye stay your thoughts down among the confused rollings and wheels of second causes, as, O, the place! O, the time! O, if this had been, this had not followed! O, the linking of this accident with this time and place! Look up to the master motion and the first wheel.

Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?

The nature of the universe is the nature of things that are. Now, things that are have kinship with things that are from the beginning. Further, this nature is styled Truth; and it is the first cause of all that is true.

Because humans are capable of choosing, the first cause that created them must have a will.

Normally, I'm good at first dates, 'cause that's the only date I ever have, so I know how to control it and be confident.

Everything starts somewhere, though many physicists disagree. But people have always been dimly aware of the problem with the start of things. They wonder how the snowplough driver gets to work, or how the makers of dictionaries look up the spelling of words.

Now I know which came first - the chicken not the egg.

You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.

The main Business of Natural Philosophy is to argue from Phænomena without feigning Hypotheses, and to deduce Causes from Effects till we come to the very first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and not only to unfold the Mechanism of the World, but chiefly to resolve these, and to such like Questions.

I don't think about one trick or the other, they just happen.

To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads; such is the behavior of the multitude.

The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.

The First Insight Theory: Mysterious coincidences cause the reconsideration of the inherent mystery that surrounds our individual lives on this planet.

[W]e have ceased to see the life in which we live. It is my intent to cause the viewer to revisit the gifts we are surrounded by and see them as if for the first time.

The body moves naturally, automatically, without any personal intervention or awareness. If we think too much, our actions become slow and hesitant.

None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.

Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?

Many of the good things would never have happened if the bad events hadn't happened first.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

Nothing comes out of nothing.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.

The problem is when [the state] monitor all of us, en masse, all of the time, without any specific justification for intercepting in the first place, without any specific judicial showing that there's a probable cause for that infringement of our rights.

But the World being once fram'd, and the course of Nature establish'd, the Naturalist, (except in some few cases, where God, or Incorporeal Agents interpose), has recourse to the first Cause but for its general and ordinary Support and Influence, whereby it preserves Matter and Motion from Annihilation or Desition; and in explicating particular phenomena, considers onely the Size, Shape, Motion, (or want of it) Texture, and the resulting Qualities and Attributes of the small particles of Matter.