Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child.”

— Thomas Hardy

152. “Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.”

— Thomas Hardy

153. “Having begun to love you, I love you for ever – in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself.”

— Thomas Hardy

154. “And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.”

— Thomas Hardy

155. “Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.”

— Thomas Hardy

156. “It was still early, and the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.”

— Thomas Hardy

157. “Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

— Thomas Hardy

158. “To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding.”

— Thomas Hardy

159. “The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”

— Thomas Hardy

160. “Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.”

— Thomas Hardy

161. “You could see the skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton.”

— Thomas Hardy

162. “The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment.”

— Thomas Hardy

163. “You are nothing to me – nothing,” said Troy, heartlessly. “A ceremony before a priest doesn’t make a marriage. I am not morally yours.”

— Thomas Hardy

164. “Alive enough to have strength to die.”

— Thomas Hardy

165. “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.”

— Thomas Hardy

166. “An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness.”

— Thomas Hardy

167. “It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete.”

— Thomas Hardy

168. “The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings ‘ll be like thousands’s and thousands’.”

— Thomas Hardy

169. “Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done?”

— Thomas Hardy

170. “It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.”

— Thomas Hardy

171. “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

— Thomas Hardy

172. “These and other of his words were nothing but the perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained paralyzed.”

— Thomas Hardy

173. “And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.”

— Thomas Hardy

174. “December morning – sunny and exceedingly mild – might have regarded Gabriel.”

— Thomas Hardy

175. “The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.”

— Thomas Hardy

176. “Tess was awake before dawn – at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.”

— Thomas Hardy

177. “That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.”

— Thomas Hardy

178. “But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn’t need what I could have, and now I be poor I can’t have what I need!”

— Thomas Hardy

179. “Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?”

— Thomas Hardy

180. “All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.”

— Thomas Hardy

181. “I have nobody in the world to fight my battles for me; but no mercy is shown. Yet if a thousand of you sneer and say things against me, I will not be put down!”

— Thomas Hardy

182. “After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again – to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them;.”

— Thomas Hardy

183. “There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity – even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete.”

— Thomas Hardy

184. “O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like an undulating billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the froth.”

— Thomas Hardy

185. “I forgot the defective can be more than the whole.”

— Thomas Hardy

186. “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?“ – Job xii. 3.”

— Thomas Hardy

187. “Your eyes are to be my stars for the future.”

— Thomas Hardy

188. “The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen them there – the vastest things of the universe imaged in objects so mean.”

— Thomas Hardy

189. “Rolliver’s inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for consumers was strictly limited to a little board.”

— Thomas Hardy

190. “Mrs. d’Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond.”

— Thomas Hardy

191. “The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him.”

— Thomas Hardy

192. “He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner: call on the husband to look at the wife: be eager to pay and intend to owe.”

— Thomas Hardy

193. “There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba’s; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel’s.”

— Thomas Hardy

194. “She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were cast.”

— Thomas Hardy

195. “She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.”

— Thomas Hardy

196. “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. 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?’ till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game.”

— Thomas Hardy

197. “Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one...”

— Thomas Hardy

198. “Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?”

— Thomas Hardy

199. “You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.”

— Thomas Hardy

200. “Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.”

— Thomas Hardy