Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

105. “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

106. “When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.”

— Thomas Hardy

107. “O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!” she cried. “Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the child!”

— Thomas Hardy

108. “Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it.”

— Thomas Hardy

109. “Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail...”

— Thomas Hardy

110. “Gabriel Oak: “It’s time for you to fight your own battles... and win them too.”

— Thomas Hardy

111. “All things merge in one another – good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics...”

— Thomas Hardy

112. “Tell me now, Angel, do you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know.” He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time. “O, Angel – I fear that means no!” said she, with a suppressed sob. “And I wanted so to see you again – so much, so much! What – not even you and I, Angel, who love each other so well?”

— Thomas Hardy

113. “The spring came and calmed her; the summer came and soothed her; the autumn arrived, and she began to be comforted, for her little girl was strong and happy, growing in size and knowledge every day.”

— Thomas Hardy

114. “Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.”

— Thomas Hardy

115. “To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.”

— Thomas Hardy

116. “But what between the poor men I won’t have, and the rich men who won’t have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!”

— Thomas Hardy

117. “My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.”

— Thomas Hardy

118. “When farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread, till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to mere chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.”

— Thomas Hardy

119. “The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.”

— Thomas Hardy

120. “Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.”

— Thomas Hardy

121. “Gabriel’s malignant star was assuredly setting fast.”

— Thomas Hardy

122. “Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?”

— Thomas Hardy

123. “It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.”

— Thomas Hardy

124. “Biblioll College. Sir, – I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours faithfully, T. Tetuphenay. To Mr. J. Fawley, Stone-mason.”

— Thomas Hardy

125. “Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet – a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness.”

— Thomas Hardy

126. “Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life – a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself.”

— Thomas Hardy

127. “The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.”

— Thomas Hardy

128. “We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.”

— Thomas Hardy

129. “So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.”

— Thomas Hardy

130. “Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.”

— Thomas Hardy

131. “It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.”

— Thomas Hardy

132. “If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now!”

— Thomas Hardy

133. “There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.”

— Thomas Hardy

134. “Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all – in fact, it rather does it good.”

— Thomas Hardy

135. “A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.”

— Thomas Hardy

136. “I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman’s moments.”

— Thomas Hardy

137. “And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles.”

— Thomas Hardy

138. “But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy – a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.”

— Thomas Hardy

139. “Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life;.”

— Thomas Hardy

140. “Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.”

— Thomas Hardy

141. “The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.”

— Thomas Hardy

142. “I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.”

— Thomas Hardy

143. “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; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman’s part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba’s position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off.”

— Thomas Hardy

144. “So passed away Sorrow the Undesired – that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week’s weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge.”

— Thomas Hardy

145. “Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a body’s cry of “Where?”

— Thomas Hardy

146. “An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit.”

— Thomas Hardy

147. “Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet.”

— Thomas Hardy

148. “She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.”

— Thomas Hardy

149. “Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway weeping – not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life.”

— Thomas Hardy

150. “Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty;.”

— Thomas Hardy