Thomas Hardy quotes
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“To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy (2011). “Under the Greenwood Tree: Or the Mellstock Quire: a Rural Painting of the Dutch School”, p.9, The Floating Press
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“Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy, Joanna Cullen Brown (1990). “Let me enjoy the earth: Thomas Hardy and nature”
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“You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy, Michael Millgate (1984). “The life and work of Thomas Hardy”
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“I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy (2012). “Jude the Obscure”, p.267, Courier Corporation
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“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy (2016). “FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (British Classics Series): Historical Romance Novel”, p.12, e-artnow
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“The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.”
-- Thomas HardySource : 1945 English Cricket.
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“Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“And yet to every bad there is a worse.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy (2016). “The Woodlanders”, p.238, Xist Publishing
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“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy (2016). “Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman”, p.360, Thomas Hardy
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“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated)”, p.1764, Delphi Classics
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“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Brontë (2016). “Classic British Love Stories: Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Jane Eyre”, p.680, Open Road Media
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“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 -
“There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“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 -
“Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“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 -
“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 -
“I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“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 -
“The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Some folk want their luck buttered.”
-- Thomas HardySource : Thomas Hardy (2016). “The Mayor of Casterbridge”, p.107, Thomas Hardy
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“The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“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 -
“...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“...Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!' 'For how long?' 'O - ever so long. Days and days.' 'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!' 'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“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 -
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“My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.”
-- 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 -
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“You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity”
-- Thomas Hardy -
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“A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“I. At Tea THE kettle descants in a cosy drone, And the young wife looks in her husband's face, And then in her guest's, and shows in her own Her sense that she fills an envied place; And the visiting lady is all abloom, And says there was never so sweet a room. And the happy young housewife does not know That the woman beside her was his first choice, Till the fates ordained it could not be so.... Betraying nothing in look or voice The guest sits smiling and sips her tea, And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“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 -
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“She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.”
-- Thomas Hardy -
“Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.”
-- Thomas Hardy
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