Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment.”

— Thomas Hardy

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

155. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

159. “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

160. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

163. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

166. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

168. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

175. “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

176. “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

177. “Judge me by my future works.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

179. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

181. “I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.”

— Thomas Hardy

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of weathers, was a strange woman of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere: there might be some devilry about her presence.”

— Thomas Hardy

186. “Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds.”

— Thomas Hardy

187. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

190. “Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.”

— Thomas Hardy

191. “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

192. “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

193. “That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down the.”

— Thomas Hardy

194. “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

195. “Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth.”

— Thomas Hardy

196. “Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly... Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.”

— Thomas Hardy

197. “The reason of that is,” she said eagerly, “that he goes in privately by the old tower door, just when the service commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me so.” This supreme instance of Troy’s goodness fell upon Gabriel ears like the thirteenth stroke of crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw a doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.”

— Thomas Hardy

198. “We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.”

— Thomas Hardy

199. “But nobody did come, because nobody does;.”

— Thomas Hardy

200. “I thought you were the ghost of yourself.”

— Thomas Hardy