Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Tory’s deformities lay deep down from a woman’s vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.”

— Thomas Hardy

358. “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

359. “He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to liquor – which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an escape from intolerable misery of the mind.”

— Thomas Hardy

360. “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

361. “Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience: to him it was ever a surprise.”

— Thomas Hardy

362. “And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.”

— Thomas Hardy

363. “I’ve been troubled with weak moments lately, ‘tis true. I’ve been drinky once this month already, and I did not go to church a-Sunday, and I dropped a curse or two yesterday; so I don’t want to go too far for my safety. Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand.” “I.”

— Thomas Hardy

364. “She was in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

367. “Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.”

— Thomas Hardy

368. “Always wanting another man than your own.”

— Thomas Hardy

369. “The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

371. “So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were not made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything; nothing is made for man.”

— Thomas Hardy

372. “But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet.”

— Thomas Hardy

373. “Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one time. Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and another.”

— Thomas Hardy

374. “In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without fancy or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a particular pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to refuse to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being unceremoniously kicked over.”

— Thomas Hardy

375. “More than ever he longed to be in some world where personal ambition was not the only recognized form of progress – such, perhaps, as might have been the case at some time or other in the silvery globe then shining upon him.”

— Thomas Hardy

376. “Little towns are like little children in this respect, that they interest most when they are enacting native peculiarities unconscious of beholders. Discovering themselves to be watched they attempt to be entertaining by putting on an antic, and produce disagreeable caricatures which spoil them. The.”

— Thomas Hardy

377. “To indulge one’s instinctive and uncontrolled sense of justice and right, was not, he had found, permitted with impunity in an old civilization like ours. It was necessary to act under an acquired and cultivated sense of the same, if you wished to enjoy an average share of comfort and honour; and to let crude loving kindness take care of itself.”

— Thomas Hardy

378. “Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess’s being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her – doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.”

— Thomas Hardy

379. “Your worldly failure, if you have failed, is to your credit rather than to your blame. Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.”

— Thomas Hardy

380. “Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one.”

— Thomas Hardy

381. “Two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience.”

— Thomas Hardy

382. “Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting.”

— Thomas Hardy

383. “His supper still remained spread; and going to the front door, and softly setting it open, he returned to the room and sat as watchers sit on Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the phantom of the Beloved. But she did not come.”

— Thomas Hardy

384. “But in recognizing her ignorance of the ratio between words to women and deeds to women in the ethical code of the bachelor of the club, she forgot that human nature in the gross differs little with situation, and that a gift which, if the germs were lacking, no amount of training in clubs and coteries could supply, was mother-wit like her own.”

— Thomas Hardy

385. “Well – I’m an outsider to the end of my days!”

— Thomas Hardy

386. “As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them – the part of – who is it? – Venus Urania.”

— Thomas Hardy

387. “The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship – that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.”

— Thomas Hardy

388. “Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.”

— Thomas Hardy

389. “I want something that makes people strong and energetic for the present, that borrows the strength of to-morrow for use to-day – leaving to-morrow without any at all for that matter; or even that would take all life away to-morrow, so long as it enabled me to get home again now.”

— Thomas Hardy

390. “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.”

— Thomas Hardy

391. “Hate him she did not quite; but he was dust and ashes to her...”

— Thomas Hardy

392. “Children begin with detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the particulars. To him the houses, the willows, the obscure fields beyond, were apparently regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows; but as human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark world.”

— Thomas Hardy

393. “She was carrying an armful of Bibles for her class, and such was her view of life that events which produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles upon her – an enviable result, although, in the opinion of Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism.”

— Thomas Hardy

394. “His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman’s looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations.”

— Thomas Hardy

395. “She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath.”

— Thomas Hardy

Featured in: Romance Quotes

396. “Perhaps you are making a cat’s paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems so – to see you sitting up there so prim.”

— Thomas Hardy

397. “She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them.”

— Thomas Hardy

398. “Strange to say of a woman in full bloom and vigor, she always allowed her interlocutors to finish their statements before rejoining with hers.”

— Thomas Hardy

399. “She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.”

— Thomas Hardy

400. “A man who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing his course.”

— Thomas Hardy