Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “I thought you were the ghost of yourself.”

— Thomas Hardy

202. “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

203. “She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.”

— Thomas Hardy

204. “Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no – they were not perfect. and 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

205. “She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.”

— Thomas Hardy

206. “They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they.”

— Thomas Hardy

207. “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

208. “The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility.”

— Thomas Hardy

209. “Henchard, like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him.”

— Thomas Hardy

210. “The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!”

— Thomas Hardy

211. “In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked that she was, and forgot that the defective can more than the entire.”

— Thomas Hardy

212. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

218. “To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country’s history;.”

— Thomas Hardy

219. “Very well,” said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

221. “I want somebody to tame me; I am too independent; and you would never be able to, I know.”

— Thomas Hardy

222. “Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!”

— Thomas Hardy

223. “You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.”

— Thomas Hardy

224. “I have seen your mother; and I will never see her again!”

— Thomas Hardy

225. “There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her saddest self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane.”

— Thomas Hardy

226. “Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself. What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become, she must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime!”

— Thomas Hardy

227. “What was the past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I became another woman, filled full of new life from you. How could I be the early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see that you was strong enough to work this change in me, you would perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife.”

— Thomas Hardy

228. “Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with trouble.”

— Thomas Hardy

229. “She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.”

— Thomas Hardy

230. “Sheer experience had already taught her that in some circumstances there was one thing better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever.”

— Thomas Hardy

231. “Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.”

— Thomas Hardy

232. “The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.”

— Thomas Hardy

233. “And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world’s room, Oak walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders.”

— Thomas Hardy

234. “Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in “Athalie”; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.”

— Thomas Hardy

235. “She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.”

— Thomas Hardy

236. “The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.”

— Thomas Hardy

237. “The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature’s own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet of still life – if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing atmosphere – and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed.”

— Thomas Hardy

238. “By experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long wandering.”

— Thomas Hardy

239. “In heaven she will probably sit between the Heloises and the Cleopatras.”

— Thomas Hardy

240. “But since ’tis as ’tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly.”

— Thomas Hardy

241. “You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall hate you!”

— Thomas Hardy

242. “But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines.”

— Thomas Hardy

243. “And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman’s most marked characteristic.”

— Thomas Hardy

244. “She heard footsteps brushing the grass, and had a consciousnesss that love was encircling her like a perfume.”

— Thomas Hardy

245. “While there’s life there’s hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the “betrayed” as some amiable theorists would have us believe.”

— Thomas Hardy

246. “This good-fellowship – camaraderie – usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely.”

— Thomas Hardy

247. “Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.”

— Thomas Hardy

248. “The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.”

— Thomas Hardy

249. “He walked from one window to another and became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company.”

— Thomas Hardy

250. “War makes rattling good history.”

— Thomas Hardy