Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

— Thomas Hardy

2. “And yet to every bad there is a worse.”

— Thomas Hardy

3. “Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.”

— Thomas Hardy

4. “I wish I had never been born – there or anywhere else.”

— Thomas Hardy

5. “And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be – and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak.”

— Thomas Hardy

6. “Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.”

— Thomas Hardy

7. “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way; and you did not help me!”

— Thomas Hardy

8. “A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

— Thomas Hardy

9. “That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.”

— Thomas Hardy

10. “I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.”

— Thomas Hardy

11. “A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.”

— Thomas Hardy

12. “If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.”

— Thomas Hardy

13. “If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.”

— Thomas Hardy

14. “I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only – only – don’t make it more than I can bear!”

— Thomas Hardy

15. “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”

— Thomas Hardy

16. “Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.”

— Thomas Hardy

17. “I may do some good before I am dead – be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

18. “Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

— Thomas Hardy

19. “War makes good history but peace is poor reading.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Reading Quotes

20. “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

21. “It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.”

— Thomas Hardy

22. “Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.”

— Thomas Hardy

23. “Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”

— Thomas Hardy

24. “The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.”

— Thomas Hardy

25. “Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.”

— Thomas Hardy

26. “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

27. “The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

28. “He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears...”

— Thomas Hardy

29. “Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”

— Thomas Hardy

30. “Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.”

— Thomas Hardy

31. “Some folk want their luck buttered.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Luck Quotes

32. “Done because we are too many.”

— Thomas Hardy

33. “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

34. “But no one came. Because no one ever does.”

— Thomas Hardy

35. “The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.”

— Thomas Hardy

36. “A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.”

— Thomas Hardy

37. “To be loved to madness – such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”

— Thomas Hardy

38. “This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?”

— Thomas Hardy

39. “Bless thy simplicity, Tess.”

— Thomas Hardy

40. “A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Reading Quotes

41. “To keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise.”

— Thomas Hardy

42. “Uncork the cider... Sabbath or no!”

— Thomas Hardy

43. “I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Romance Quotes

44. “Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.”

— Thomas Hardy

45. “We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by;.”

— Thomas Hardy

46. “Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.”

— Thomas Hardy

47. “You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!”

— Thomas Hardy

48. “You have never loved me as I love you – never – never! Yours is not a passionate heart – your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite – not a woman!”

— Thomas Hardy

49. “It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise.”

— Thomas Hardy

50. “It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession.”

— Thomas Hardy