Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?”

— Thomas Hardy

52. “But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.”

— Thomas Hardy

53. “Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.”

— Thomas Hardy

54. “Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it Tess?”

— Thomas Hardy

55. “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

56. “All romances end at marriage.”

— Thomas Hardy

57. “The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.”

— Thomas Hardy

58. “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

59. “I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability.”

— Thomas Hardy

60. “You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.”

— Thomas Hardy

61. “Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?”

— Thomas Hardy

62. “Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.”

— Thomas Hardy

63. “You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.”

— Thomas Hardy

64. “It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.”

— Thomas Hardy

65. “People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.”

— Thomas Hardy

66. “Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.”

— Thomas Hardy

67. “But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.”

— Thomas Hardy

68. “So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope...”

— Thomas Hardy

69. “Women accept their destiny more readily than men.”

— Thomas Hardy

70. “My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”

— Thomas Hardy

71. “He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.”

— Thomas Hardy

72. “Dazzled by brass and scarlet – O, Bathsheba – this is a woman’s folly indeed!”

— Thomas Hardy

73. “There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.”

— Thomas Hardy

74. “What are my books but one plea against “man’s inhumanity to man” – to woman – and to the lower animals?”

— Thomas Hardy

75. “There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.”

— Thomas Hardy

76. “You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always.”

— Thomas Hardy

77. “The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”

— Thomas Hardy

78. “Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.”

— Thomas Hardy

79. “He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon.”

— Thomas Hardy

80. “When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.”

— Thomas Hardy

81. “If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.”

— Thomas Hardy

82. “She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen and among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?”

— Thomas Hardy

83. “In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.”

— Thomas Hardy

84. “That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!”

— Thomas Hardy

85. “Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.”

— Thomas Hardy

86. “Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”

— Thomas Hardy

87. “So do flux and reflux – the rhythm of change – alternate and persist in everything under the sky.”

— Thomas Hardy

88. “Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.”

— Thomas Hardy

89. “If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.”

— Thomas Hardy

90. “Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.”

— Thomas Hardy

91. “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”

— Thomas Hardy

92. “Let truth be told – women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life there’s hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the “betrayed” as some amiable theorists would have us believe.”

— Thomas Hardy

93. “Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.”

— Thomas Hardy

94. “They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.”

— Thomas Hardy

95. “New love is brightest, and long love is greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth.”

— Thomas Hardy

96. “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

97. “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.”

— Thomas Hardy

98. “The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.”

— Thomas Hardy

99. “Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.”

— Thomas Hardy

100. “Peace and war kiss each other at their hours of preparation – sickles, scythes, shears, and pruning-hooks, ranking with swords, bayonets, and lances, in their common necessity for point and edge.”

— Thomas Hardy