Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I have been thinking”, she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, “that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.”

— Thomas Hardy

302. “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

303. “He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life. These struggling men and women before him were the reality of Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster. That was one of the humours of things. The floating population of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not Christminster in a local sense at all.”

— Thomas Hardy

304. “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

305. “As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray.”

— Thomas Hardy

306. “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

307. “Boldwood, whose unreasoning devotion to Bathsheba could only be characterized as a fond madness which neither time nor circumstance, evil nor good report, could weaken or destroy. This fevered hope had grown up again like a grain of mustard-seed during the quiet which followed the hasty conjecture that Troy was drowned. He nourished it fearfully, and almost shunned the contemplation of it in earnest, lest facts should reveal the wildness of the dream. Bathsheba having at last been persuaded.”

— Thomas Hardy

308. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

310. “The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humourousness.”

— Thomas Hardy

311. “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

312. “But what is Wisdom really? A steady handling of any means to bring about any end necessary to happiness. Yet whether one’s end be the usual end – a wealthy position in life – or no, the name of wisdom is seldom applied but to the means to that usual end.”

— Thomas Hardy

313. “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

314. “This supreme instance of Troy’s goodness fell upon Gabriel’s ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

316. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

318. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

320. “Suddenly she aroused herself and exclaimed, “But I’ll shake it off. Yes, I will shake it off! No one shall know my suffering. I’ll be bitterly merry, and ironically gay, and I’ll laugh in derision! – Eustacia Vye.”

— Thomas Hardy

321. “And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will.”

— Thomas Hardy

322. “Eustacia, I don’t know where to look: my thoughts go through me like swords.”

— Thomas Hardy

323. “She tried to pray to God, but it was her husband who really had her supplication. Her idolatry of this man was such that she herself almost feared it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion expressed by Friar Lawerence, “These violent delights have violent ends.” It might be too desperate for human conditions – too rank, too wild, too deadly.”

— Thomas Hardy

324. “Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”

— Thomas Hardy

325. “Five years, nine months, and a few days. Fifteen months nearly have passed since he vanished, and is there anything so wonderful in an engagement of little more than five years?”

— Thomas Hardy

326. “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

327. “The curious double strands in Farfrae’s thread of life – the commercial and the romantic – were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.”

— Thomas Hardy

328. “What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real.”

— Thomas Hardy

329. “There was a change in Boldwood’s exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.”

— Thomas Hardy

330. “He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.”

— Thomas Hardy

331. “In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the brighter endurance of women at these epochs – invaluable, sweet, angelic, as it is – owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that shuts out many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a hopefulness intense enough to quell them.”

— Thomas Hardy

332. “Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.”

— Thomas Hardy

333. “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

334. “I hate to be what is called a clever girl – there are too many of that sort now!”

— Thomas Hardy

335. “There are two ways of getting rid of sorrows: one by living them down, the other by drowning them. The coachman drowned his. He informed her that her luggage.”

— Thomas Hardy

336. “Cry about one thing in life, cry about all; one thread runs through the whole piece.”

— Thomas Hardy

337. “Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.”

— Thomas Hardy

338. “His had been a love ’which alters when it alteration finds.”

— Thomas Hardy

339. “The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.”

— Thomas Hardy

340. “And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong.”

— Thomas Hardy

341. “Oh yes,” she said, quickly. “I know all that. But don’t talk of it – seven or six years – where may we all be by that time?” “They will soon glide by, and it will seem an astonishingly short time to look back upon when they are past – much less than to look forward to now.”

— Thomas Hardy

342. “He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.”

— Thomas Hardy

343. “The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.”

— Thomas Hardy

344. “Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.”

— Thomas Hardy

345. “Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.”

— Thomas Hardy

346. “I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking they’d be all withered in a few days!”

— Thomas Hardy

347. “Thus, neither having the clue to the other’s secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other’s character and moods without attempting to pry into each other’s history.”

— Thomas Hardy

348. “By making inquiries he found that the girl’s name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day.”

— Thomas Hardy

349. “Oh my love, my love, why do I love you so?” she whispered there alone; “for she you love is not myself, but one in my image; the one I might have been!”

— Thomas Hardy

350. “Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover’s most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover’s most venial sin.”

— Thomas Hardy