Thomas Hardy Quotes

221 Sourced Quotes

Aggressive Fancy working spells
Upon a mind o'erwrought.

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
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

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
Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.

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
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

Thomas Hardy
To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.

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

Thomas Hardy
When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

Thomas Hardy
What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?
It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance.

Thomas Hardy
He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.

Thomas Hardy
Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

Thomas Hardy
All that blooth means heavy autumn work for him and his hands.

Thomas Hardy
Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…

Thomas Hardy
The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

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
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
You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!

Thomas Hardy
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us
Men who march away!

Thomas Hardy
There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.

Thomas Hardy
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

Thomas Hardy
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

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
We will get outside the solar system altogether, leave the whole group of sun, primary, and secondary planets quite behind us in our flight, as a bird might leave its bush and sweep into the whole forest.

Thomas Hardy
As they crept along, stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was reflected from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish, moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their backs in all the strength of noon.

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
Until a person has thought out the stars and their interspaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky.

Thomas Hardy