Top 500 Thomas Hardy Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

415. “By experience”, says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long wandering.” Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?”

— Thomas Hardy

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

422. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

431. “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

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. “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

435. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

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

— Thomas Hardy

446. “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

447. “If men only knew the staleness of the freshest of us! that nine times out of ten the “first love” they think they are winning from a woman is but the hulk of an old wrecked affection, fitted with new sails and re-used.”

— Thomas Hardy

448. “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

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

— Thomas Hardy

450. “The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side.”

— Thomas Hardy