Thomas Hardy Quotes

221 Sourced Quotes

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

Thomas Hardy
Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine
In even monochrome and curving line
Of imperturbable serenity.
How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry
With the torn troubled form I know as thine,
That profile, placid as a brow divine,
With continents of moil and misery?

Thomas Hardy
What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real.

Thomas Hardy
So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.

Thomas Hardy
Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Not from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

Thomas Hardy
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
With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.

Thomas Hardy
Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody's hand!

Thomas Hardy
And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!

Thomas Hardy
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
How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!...I do not deserve my lot!...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!

Thomas Hardy
Why doth IT so and so, and ever so,
This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

Thomas Hardy
Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.

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
It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.

Thomas Hardy
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")

Thomas Hardy
Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?

Thomas Hardy
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

Thomas Hardy
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.

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
Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.

Thomas Hardy
Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.

Thomas Hardy
This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
And nestlings fly.

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

Thomas Hardy
When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness.

Thomas Hardy
She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

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

Thomas Hardy
Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws & nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be — & the non-necessity of it.

Thomas Hardy
Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a 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
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

Thomas Hardy