Thomas Hardy Quotes

Good but not religious-good.

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn — at the marginal minute of the da...

Done because we are too many.

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

Love lives on propinquity but dies on contact.

Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf manobserving people listening to music. Yo...

I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the h...

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never ...

You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.

Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.

Fear is the mother of foresight.

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is ...

Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.

I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfaste...

Patience that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?

Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though tha...

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

...there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round ho...

But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed ang...

If way to the Better there be it exacts a full look at the Worst.

She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seeme...

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial inte...

As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite su...

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired...

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

Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand- she's as...

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's a...

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.

It was the week after Easter holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the light...

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almo...

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

You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any ...

But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts...

But I wish to be enlightened.''Let me caution you against it.''Is enlightenment on the subject, then...

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 t...

Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dal...

To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She lo...

She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially a...

Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighboring yeomen, the listener said, "Ah, Clym Yeob...

What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequentl...

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little p...

Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sander...

The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole...

It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in...

A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long...

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a bri...

And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, an...

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time ...

Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substi...

It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.

Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year roun...

Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.

He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not reall...

The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a deli...

I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.

The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very...

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects...

She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.

Her suspense was terrible.

Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in s...

If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard ...

She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes a...

Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and incon...

A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.

Though fervent was our vow,Though ruddily ran our pleasure,Bliss has fulfilled its measure,And sees ...

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

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

All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; ...

Tess was awake before dawn — at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save f...

Joan Durbeyfield always manged to find consolation somewhere: 'Well, as one of the genuine stock, sh...

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simples...

Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now a...

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, th...

Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and...

Tess's feminine hope - shall we confess it - had been so obstinately recuperative as to revive in he...

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, a...

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly - the thought of the world's concern ...

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

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never...

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made...

This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And ne...

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observ...

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality...

[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, ...

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and moral...

...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much o...

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

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods...

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.