Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “A woman may be treated with a bitterness which is sweet to her, and with a rudeness which is not offensive.”

— Thomas Hardy

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.”

— Thomas Hardy

255. “He admired her so much that he used to light the candle three times a night to look at her.”

— Thomas Hardy

256. “He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain.”

— Thomas Hardy

257. “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

258. “The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more.”

— Thomas Hardy

259. “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

260. “That the party was intended to be a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt.”

— Thomas Hardy

261. “No average man will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look “Come on” he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes.”

— Thomas Hardy

262. “I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.”

— Thomas Hardy

263. “Don’t for God’s sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself – poor me!”

— Thomas Hardy

264. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

266. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

269. “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

270. “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

271. “Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale...”

— Thomas Hardy

272. “But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another’s horizon is.”

— Thomas Hardy

273. “It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.”

— Thomas Hardy

274. “When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think.”

— Thomas Hardy

275. “Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.”

— Thomas Hardy

276. “His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness.”

— Thomas Hardy

277. “Why – what the name – began her father. I thought you went out to get the parsley!”

— Thomas Hardy

278. “Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.”

— Thomas Hardy

279. “Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression.”

— Thomas Hardy

280. “The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing.”

— Thomas Hardy

281. “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

282. “An unedified palate is the irrepressible cloven foot of the upstart. The.”

— Thomas Hardy

283. “And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath.”

— Thomas Hardy

284. “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

285. “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

286. “She remained mute, not knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek, a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.”

— Thomas Hardy

287. “This weakness of character... suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain on his unncessary life.”

— Thomas Hardy

288. “It depends entirely upon what is meant by being truly great. But the long and the short of the matter is, that men must stick to a thing if they want to succeed in it – not giving way to over-much admiration for the flowers they see growing in other people’s borders; which I am afraid has been my case.′ He looked into the far distance and paused.”

— Thomas Hardy

289. “I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly ! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!”

— Thomas Hardy

290. “In the middle of the porch was a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, ‘Here’s your fine model dial; here’s any time for any man; I am an old dial; and shiftiness is the best policy.”

— Thomas Hardy

291. “And if you hear a frog jump into the pond with a flounce like a stone thrown in, be sure you run and tell me, because it is a sign of rain.”

— Thomas Hardy

292. “I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal.”

— Thomas Hardy

293. “She dismissed the past – trod upon it and put it out, as one treads on a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.”

— Thomas Hardy

294. “The real sin ma’am, in my mind lies in thinking of ever wedding with a man you don’t love honest and true.”

— Thomas Hardy

295. “My dear Sue, – Of course I wish you joy! And also of course I will give you away. What I suggest is that, as you have no house of your own, you do not marry from your school friend’s, but from mine. It would be more proper, I think, since I am, as you say, the person nearest related to you in this part of the world. I don’t see why you sign your letter in such a new and terribly formal way? Surely you care a bit about me still! – Ever your affectionate, Jude.”

— Thomas Hardy

296. “He had no wish to converse with her: that his bright lady and himself formed one group, exclusively their own, and containing no others in the world, was enough.”

— Thomas Hardy

297. “Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary.”

— Thomas Hardy

298. “What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes it’s only one!”

— Thomas Hardy

299. “Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love 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 any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”

— Thomas Hardy

300. “The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”

— Thomas Hardy