Top 100 Thomas Hardy Quotes
#1. She simply observed herself as a fair product of Nature in the feminine kind, her thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part - vistas of probable triumphs - the smiles being of a phase suggesting that hearts were imagined as lost and won.
Thomas Hardy
#2. Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own - then,
Thomas Hardy
#3. Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.
Thomas Hardy
#4. A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
Thomas Hardy
#5. My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
Thomas Hardy
#6. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
Thomas Hardy
#7. Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.
Thomas Hardy
#8. Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast.
Thomas Hardy
#9. Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting.
Thomas Hardy
#10. I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly.
Thomas Hardy
#11. To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.
Thomas Hardy
#12. With Sue as companion he could have renounced his ambitions with a smile. Without her it was inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had subjected himself should affect him disastrously.
Thomas Hardy
#13. Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
Thomas Hardy
#14. You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.
Thomas Hardy
#15. You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall hate you!
Thomas Hardy
#16. Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and moods without attempting to pry into each other's history.
Thomas Hardy
#17. Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed!
Thomas Hardy
#18. He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.
Thomas Hardy
#19. And if you hear a frog jump into the pond with a flounce like a stone thrown in, be sure you run and tell me, because it is a sign of rain.
Thomas Hardy
#20. Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all - in fact, it rather does it good.
Thomas Hardy
#21. ...what only hurts me now would torture and kill me then!
Thomas Hardy
#22. Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
Thomas Hardy
#23. And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will.
Thomas Hardy
#24. Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
Thomas Hardy
#25. Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.
Thomas Hardy
#26. She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.
Thomas Hardy
#27. If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later.
Thomas Hardy
#28. I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, 'Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!
Thomas Hardy
#29. Who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been melted into it when in a liquid state, and could not now be unstuck ...
Thomas Hardy
#30. That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.
Thomas Hardy
#31. People who have always gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong.
Thomas Hardy
#32. But no one came. Because no one ever does.
Thomas Hardy
#33. His experience of women was great enough for him to be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him not to know that in the manner of the present negative there lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness.
Thomas Hardy
#34. But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
Thomas Hardy
#35. The man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.
Thomas Hardy
#36. Behind him the hill are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless.
Thomas Hardy
#37. O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always.
Thomas Hardy
#38. And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the warmth of her breath.
Thomas Hardy
#39. Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
Thomas Hardy
#40. To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
Thomas Hardy
#41. It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition.
Thomas Hardy
#43. There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defences for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.
Thomas Hardy
#44. If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
Thomas Hardy
#45. Perhaps to know her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion.
Thomas Hardy
#46. It was still early, and 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.
Thomas Hardy
#47. That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
Thomas Hardy
#48. My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
#49. I think of people more kindly when I am away from them.
Thomas Hardy
#50. Though the whole troop wore white garments, no two whites were alike amoung them. Some approached pure blanching, some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters (which has possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a cadavourous tint, and to a georgian style.
Thomas Hardy
#51. 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
#52. Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the transparent tissue as in an aviary.
Thomas Hardy
#53. In about the time a person unaccustomed to bodily labour would have decided upon which side to lie, Farmer Oak was asleep. The
Thomas Hardy
#54. She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them.
Thomas Hardy
#55. Learn something about everything,
And everything about something.
Thomas Hardy
#56. Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied sould of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way to say a little is often to tell more than to say.
Thomas Hardy
#57. To give too much room to the latent feeling which is rather common in these days among the unappreciated, that because some remarkably successful men are fools, all remarkably unsuccessful men are geniuses.' 'Pretty
Thomas Hardy
#58. To be loved to madness
such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
Thomas Hardy
#59. 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
#60. Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
Thomas Hardy
#61. You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
Thomas Hardy
#62. It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out
of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a
short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
Thomas Hardy
#63. He's the man we were in search of, that's true, and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.
Thomas Hardy
#64. She showed a natural aptitude for little domestic refinements, so far as related to things and manners; but in what is called culture she
Thomas Hardy
#65. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.
Thomas Hardy
#66. She is one of those people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody knows her entirely. She
Thomas Hardy
#67. Very well, said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever.
Thomas Hardy
#68. I hate to be what is called a clever girl
there are too many of that sort now!
Thomas Hardy
#69. He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine.
Thomas Hardy
#70. A headstrong maid, that she is-and won't listen to no advice at all. Pride and vanity have ruined many a cobbler's dog.
Thomas Hardy
#71. Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
Thomas Hardy
#72. A little stimulated at not finding her ready and waiting - so fanciful are men! - he hastened on...
Thomas Hardy
#73. No, I am not a lady,' she said sadly. 'I never shall be. But he's a gentleman, and that - makes it - O how difficult for me!
Thomas Hardy
#74. The 'appetite for joy' which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the ride sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric
Thomas Hardy
#75. At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.
Thomas Hardy
#76. but though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play.
Thomas Hardy
#77. Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.
Thomas Hardy
#79. I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
Thomas Hardy
#80. Misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror.
Thomas Hardy
#81. But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose
Thomas Hardy
#82. Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.
Thomas Hardy
#83. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.
Thomas Hardy
#84. Tell him everything; it is best. He will forgive you.
Thomas Hardy
#85. Though fervent was our vow,
Though ruddily ran our pleasure,
Bliss has fulfilled its measure,
And sees its sentence now.
Ache deep; but make no moans:
Smile out; but stilly suffer:
The paths of love are rougher
Than thoroughfares of stones.
Thomas Hardy
#86. in the month-by-month process of editorial criticism and censorship, Hardy never lost his fierce contempt for all forms of 'tampering with natural truth
Thomas Hardy
#87. There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.
Thomas Hardy
#88. I don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough to fight her own battles,
Thomas Hardy
#89. 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
#90. Oak was just thinking that whatever he
himself might have suffered from Bathsheba's marriage, here was a
man who had suffered more, when Boldwood spoke in a changed
voice - that of one who yearned to make a confidence and relieve his
heart by an outpouring.
Thomas Hardy
#91. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
Thomas Hardy
#92. But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is.
Thomas Hardy
#93. 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
#94. So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope ...
Thomas Hardy
#95. Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
Thomas Hardy
#96. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line.
Thomas Hardy
#97. Principles which could be subverted by feeling in one direction were liable to the same catastrophe in another. The
Thomas Hardy
#98. And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be - and whenever I look up, there will be you.
-Gabriel Oak
Thomas Hardy
#99. The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man. This
Thomas Hardy
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