Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

305. “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

306. “Then he stood with his back to the fire regarding her, and saw in her almost a divinity.”

— Thomas Hardy

307. “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

308. “The ‘appetite for joy’ which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the ride sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.”

— Thomas Hardy

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

315. “That’s why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.”

— Thomas Hardy

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “The village was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere: she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.”

— Thomas Hardy

329. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

331. “The rain still continued, the candlelight falling upon the nearest drops and making glistening darts of them as they descended across the throng of invisible ones behind. To plunge into that medium was to plunge into water slightly diluted with air.”

— Thomas Hardy

332. “If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it. Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come within.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “If these two noticed Angel’s growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to him all Church; Cubbert all College... Each brother candidly recognized there were a few unimportant scores of millions outside in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.”

— Thomas Hardy

343. “A profile was visible against the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting both.”

— Thomas Hardy

344. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

346. “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

347. “A young woman’s face will turn the north wind, Master Richard: my heart if ’twon’t.”

— Thomas Hardy

348. “I hate such eccentricities, Sue. There’s no order or regularity in your sentiments!”

— Thomas Hardy

349. “The daylight has nothing to show me, since you are not here, and I don’t like to see the rooks and starlings in the fields, because I grieve and grieve to miss you who used to see them with me. I long for only one thing in heaven or earth or under the earth, to meet you my own dear! Come to me – come to me, and save me from what threatens me! – Your faithful heartbroken.”

— Thomas Hardy

350. “They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them.”

— Thomas Hardy