Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Principles which could be subverted by feeling in one direction were liable to the same catastrophe in another. The.”

— Thomas Hardy

252. “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

253. “To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction – every kind of evidence in the logician’s list – have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite alone.”

— Thomas Hardy

254. “The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus – the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.”

— Thomas Hardy

255. “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

256. “Hang it, I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there’s nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t either.”

— Thomas Hardy

257. “A woman may be treated with a bitterness which is sweet to her, and with a rudeness which is not offensive.”

— Thomas Hardy

258. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

260. “The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind – or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.”

— Thomas Hardy

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

264. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

267. “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

268. “He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated: he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family.”

— Thomas Hardy

269. “All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun.”

— Thomas Hardy

270. “Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that’s saying a good deal.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

284. “When sorrow ceases to be speculative sleep sees her opportunity.”

— Thomas Hardy

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm.”

— Thomas Hardy

290. “Rays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts;.”

— Thomas Hardy

291. “Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.”

— Thomas Hardy

292. “That’s my fist.” Here he placed his fist, rather smaller in size than a common loaf, in the mathematical centre of the maltster’s little table, and with it gave a bump or two thereon, as if to ensure that their eyes all thoroughly took in the idea of fistiness before he went further.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

294. “Clare knew that she loved him – every curve of her form showed that – but he did not know at that time the full depth of her devotion, its single-mindedness, its meekness; what long-suffering it guaranteed, what honesty, what endurance, what good faith.”

— Thomas Hardy

295. “The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn’ was just sufficient to reveal to them the melancholy red leaves, lying thickly in the channels by the roadside, ever and anon loudly tapped on by heavy drops of water, which the boughs above had collected from the foggy air.”

— 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. “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

298. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

300. “Love has its own dark morality when rivalry enters in.”

— Thomas Hardy