Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

409. “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

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. “One’s pretty lively when ruined.”

— Thomas Hardy

413. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

415. “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

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. “Love begins with a sense of superior discernment.”

— Thomas Hardy

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

424. “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

425. “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

426. “Hastily flinging her cloak around her she opened the door and followed, putting out the candles as if she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night was now clear.”

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

— Thomas Hardy

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

433. “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

434. “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

435. “Time enough to cry when you know ’tis a crying matter; ’tis bad to meet troubles half-way.”

— Thomas Hardy

436. “The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

439. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

441. “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

442. “But loving is not done by months, or method, or rule, or nobody would ever have invented such a phrase as “falling in love.”

— Thomas Hardy

443. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

446. “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

447. “I object to that conversation!” interposed the old woman. “I was not capable enough to hear what I said, and what is said out of my hearing is not evidence.”

— Thomas Hardy

448. “Between himself and her there was that kind of division which is more insurmountable than enmity; for estrangements produced by good judgment will last when those of feeling break down in smiles. Not the lovers who part in passion, but the lovers who part in friendship, are those who most frequently part forever.”

— Thomas Hardy

449. “The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.”

— Thomas Hardy

450. “He can blow the flute very well-that ‘a can,’ said a young married man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as ‘Susan Tall’s husband.”

— Thomas Hardy