Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “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

203. “I have danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile and many a long day.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

208. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “You were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!”

— Thomas Hardy

216. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

219. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

221. “He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Thomas Hardy

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

230. “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

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. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

234. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

236. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

238. “I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to ’em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!”

— Thomas Hardy

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

242. “She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

244. “He is a sort of steady man in a wild way, you know. That’s better than to be as some are, wild in a steady way. I am afraid that’s how I am.”

— Thomas Hardy

245. “It was mid-May time, bringing with it weather not, perhaps, quite so blooming as that assumed to be natural to the month by the joyous poets of three hundred years ago; but a very tolerable, well-wearing May, that the average rustic would willingly have compounded for in lieu of Mays occasionally fairer, but usually more foul.”

— Thomas Hardy

246. “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

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

250. “And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.”

— Thomas Hardy