Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

419. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

432. “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

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. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

436. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

441. “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

442. “Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of her life was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive pleasure and positive pain.”

— Thomas Hardy

443. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

445. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

449. “There are considerations even before my consideration for you; reparations to be made-ties you know nothing of. If you repent of marrying, so do I.”

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy