Thomas Hardy Quotes

221 Sourced Quotes

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.

Thomas Hardy
Time changes everything, except something within us which is always surprised by change.

Thomas Hardy
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.

Thomas Hardy
The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

Thomas Hardy
George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.

Thomas Hardy
In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale.

Thomas Hardy
That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. And that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. And that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. And that nobody is wished to see my dead body. And that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. And that no flours be planted on my grave. And that no man remember me.

Thomas Hardy
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Thomas Hardy
I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

Thomas Hardy
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history, Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event, Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

Thomas Hardy
Another year's installment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.

Thomas Hardy
And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.

Thomas Hardy
She moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.

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
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
Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"

Thomas Hardy
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

Thomas Hardy
Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.

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
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Thomas Hardy
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

Thomas Hardy
'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.

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
Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

Thomas Hardy
At once a voice outburst among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

Thomas Hardy