Thomas Hardy Quotes

Always wanting another man than your own.

~ Thomas Hardy

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

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

But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are.

~ Thomas Hardy

The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.

~ Thomas Hardy

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 rougherThan thoroughfares of stones.

~ Thomas Hardy

Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence.

~ Thomas Hardy

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. So I like the parson's opinion on law, the lawyer's on doctoring, the doctor's on business, and my business-man's . . . on morals.

~ Thomas Hardy

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting outof love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as ashort cut that way, but it has been known to fail.

~ Thomas Hardy

Don't that make your bosom plim?

~ Thomas Hardy

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

~ Thomas Hardy

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.

~ Thomas Hardy

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

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play

~ Thomas Hardy

Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences.

~ Thomas Hardy

An average woman is in this superior to an average man—that she never instigates, only responds.

~ Thomas Hardy

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.

~ Thomas Hardy

Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occassional laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride - the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won from all other women - unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted.

~ Thomas Hardy

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

~ Thomas Hardy

We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks whilst a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek.

~ Thomas Hardy

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

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

~ Thomas Hardy

Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.

~ Thomas Hardy

They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

~ Thomas Hardy

Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.

~ Thomas Hardy

being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another’s heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.

~ Thomas Hardy

I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!

~ Thomas Hardy

you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.

~ Thomas Hardy

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.

~ Thomas Hardy

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

~ Thomas Hardy

All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

~ Thomas Hardy

I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!

~ Thomas Hardy

You know, mistress, that I love you, and shall love you always

~ Thomas Hardy

If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

~ Thomas Hardy

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.

~ Thomas Hardy

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary... She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

~ Thomas Hardy

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more.

~ Thomas Hardy

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing.

~ Thomas Hardy

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?Yes.All like ours?I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted.Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?A blighted one.

~ Thomas Hardy

And strange-eyed constellations reignHis stars eternally.

~ Thomas Hardy