Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.”

— Thomas Hardy

402. “To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.”

— Thomas Hardy

403. “She had not meant him to translate her words about returning home so literally at the first; she had not intended him to learn her secret; but more than all she was not able to endure the perception of his learning it and continuing unmoved.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

410. “Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

412. “It was still early, and though the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet. There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

414. “Perhaps in no minor point does a woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false – except indeed in that of being utterly skeptical on strictures that she knows to be true.”

— Thomas Hardy

415. “I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly.”

— Thomas Hardy

416. “Had Philip’s warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilisation without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed; but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.”

— Thomas Hardy

417. “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. The scales are balanced so nicely that a feather would turn them.”

— Thomas Hardy

418. “For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man.”

— Thomas Hardy

419. “We have missed because we tried to miss, I suppose.”

— Thomas Hardy

420. “She is a bold and passionate woman, fighting to earn respect as a farm owner and over the course of the novel she has to endure much suffering, which enhances her better qualities while diminishing some elements of her less admirable traits.”

— Thomas Hardy

421. “I think of people more kindly when I am away from them.”

— Thomas Hardy

422. “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. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...”

— Thomas Hardy

423. “He read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.”

— Thomas Hardy

424. “And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.”

— Thomas Hardy

425. “The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from crown to toe.”

— Thomas Hardy

426. “Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.”

— Thomas Hardy

427. “Ah, want of an object to live for – that’s all is the matter with me!”

— Thomas Hardy

428. “The fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers.”

— Thomas Hardy

429. “The fact is,” said d’Uberville drily, “whatever your dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That’s just like you women. Your mind is enslaved to his.”

— Thomas Hardy

430. “I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books.”

— Thomas Hardy

431. “We are acting by the letter; and ’the letter killeth.”

— Thomas Hardy

432. “One’s pretty lively when ruined.”

— Thomas Hardy

433. “You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!”

— Thomas Hardy

434. “That’s a handsome maid,” he said to Oak. “But she has her faults,” said Gabriel. “True, farmer.” “And the greatest of them is – well, what it is always.” “Beating people down? ay, ‘tis so.” “O no.” “What, then?” Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller’s indifference, glanced back to where he had witnessed her performance over the hedge, and said, “Vanity.”

— Thomas Hardy

435. “Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts.”

— Thomas Hardy

436. “Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often enough had he tried to reach those lips against her consent – often had he said gaily that her mouth and breath tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and honey on which she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them, and other follies of that sort. But he did not care for them now.”

— Thomas Hardy

437. “No. When I want a broad-minded opinion for general enlightenment, distinct from special advice, I never go to a man who deals in the subject professionally.”

— Thomas Hardy

438. “The chief pleasure connected with asking an opinion lies in not adopting it.”

— Thomas Hardy

439. “He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation. Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle irreverence, called his demi-gods, would have shunned such encounters if they doubted their own strength. But he could not. He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine.”

— Thomas Hardy

440. “Possibly she would go on inflicting such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and again, in all her colossal inconsistency.”

— Thomas Hardy

441. “This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.”

— Thomas Hardy

442. “How did this remarkable reappearance effect itself when he was supposed by many to be at the bottom of the sea?”

— Thomas Hardy

443. “Allow me to come with you,’ he said, accompanying her to the door, and again showing by his behaviour how much he was impressed with her. His influence over her had vanished with the musical chords, and she turned her back upon him. ‘May I come?’ he repeated. ‘No, no. The distance is not a quarter of a mile – it is really not necessary, thank you,’ she said quietly. And.”

— Thomas Hardy

444. “Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind’s eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.”

— Thomas Hardy

445. “Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand.”

— Thomas Hardy

446. “Our moods meet in the wrong places.”

— Thomas Hardy

447. “O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness; send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.”

— Thomas Hardy

448. “An average woman is in this superior to an average man – that she never instigates, only responds.”

— Thomas Hardy

449. “Decisive action is seen by appreciative minds to be frequently objectless, and sometimes fatal; but decision, however suicidal, has more charm for a woman than the most unequivocal Fabian success.”

— Thomas Hardy

450. “When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land, And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”

— Thomas Hardy