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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #27993
#2. Her one desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him her lord, her own - then,

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #59651
#3. Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #92228
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #112768
#5. My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #124283
#6. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #147703
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #155980
#8. Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #175940
#9. Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #234507
#10. I will help to my last breath the woman I have loved so dearly.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #241914
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #264095
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #296764
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #298634
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #352002
#15. You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall hate you!

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #380921
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #423679
#17. Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed!

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #447416
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #458867
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #461633
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #503866
#21. ...what only hurts me now would torture and kill me then!

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #563086
#22. Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #625743
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #627072
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #627483
#25. Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a bygone herself.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #628438
#26. She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #633821
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #638362
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #639278
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #656465
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #667970
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #686136
#32. But no one came. Because no one ever does.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #687926
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #692528
#34. But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #698511
#35. The man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #719538
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #740370
#37. O, how I wish I had never seen him! Loving is misery for women always.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #759343
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #846642
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #889550
#40. To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #892705
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #896414
#42. Bless thy simplicity, Tess

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #911062
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #926905
#44. If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #930397
#45. Perhaps to know her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #936426
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #938067
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #944174
#48. My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #958896
#49. I think of people more kindly when I am away from them.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #994458
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #994952
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #999805
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1021154
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1050664
#54. She might have looked her thanks to Gabriel on a minute scale, but she did not speak them.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1079093
#55. Learn something about everything,
And everything about something.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1120472
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1128029
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1141231
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1157841
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1159886
#60. Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1172495
#61. You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1185384
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1195884
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1197513
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1221607
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1249296
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1261232
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1282777
#68. I hate to be what is called a clever girl
there are too many of that sort now!

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1298752
#69. He might fast and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful in him than the Divine.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1308861
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1341892
#71. Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1342121
#72. A little stimulated at not finding her ready and waiting - so fanciful are men! - he hastened on...

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1446587
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1447157
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1479380
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1502297
#76. but though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1563622
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1564584
#78. One's pretty lively when ruined.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1589321
#79. I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1597780
#80. Misfortune is a fine opiate to personal terror.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1604522
#81. But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1605624
#82. Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1607149
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1613081
#84. Tell him everything; it is best. He will forgive you.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1622473
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1635218
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1650746
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1656449
#88. I don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough to fight her own battles,

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1685219
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1696618
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1700691
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1703010
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1712087
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1740650
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1746908
#95. Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1748250
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1753954
#97. Principles which could be subverted by feeling in one direction were liable to the same catastrophe in another. The

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1768781
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1779818
#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

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1835438
#100. Don't that make your bosom plim?

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes #1837584

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