Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

360. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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. “She could have never believed in the morning that her colorless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope.”

— Thomas Hardy

391. “In the worst attacks of trouble there appears to be always a superficial film of consciousness which is left disengaged and open to the notice of trifles, and Bathsheba was faintly amused at the boy’s method, till he too passed on.”

— Thomas Hardy

392. “Let me look right into your moonlit face, and dwell on every line and curve in it!”

— Thomas Hardy

393. “Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it.” “You are very philosophical. ‘A negation’ is profound talking.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

395. “But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

397. “I determined you should come; and you have come! I have shown my power.”

— Thomas Hardy

398. “Ah, a time of his life shall come when he will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn – as I do now!”

— Thomas Hardy

399. “He had passed through an ordeal of wretchedness which had given him more than it had taken away. He had lost all he possessed of worldly property; he had sunk from his modest elevation down to a lower ditch than that from which he had started; but he had now a dignified calm he had never known before and that indifference to fate. And thus the abasement had been an exaltation and the loss gain.”

— Thomas Hardy

400. “Durbeyfield was what was locally called a slack-twisted fellow; he had good strength to work at times; but the times could not be relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement; and, having been unaccustomed to the regular toil of the day-labourer, he was not particularly persistent when they did so coincide.”

— Thomas Hardy