Thomas Hardy quotes - page 6

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet, renowned for his evocative portrayals of rural life and society’s constraints. His major works, such as "Tess of the d’Urbervilles" and "Far from the Madding Crowd," explore themes of fate, love, and human suffering. He influenced generations of writers and remains celebrated for his powerful literary legacy. Here are 208 of his quotes:

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.

Thomas Hardy

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.

Thomas Hardy

How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?

Thomas Hardy

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair.

Thomas Hardy

The heath and changes of weather were quite blotted out from their eyes for the present. They were enclosed in a sort of luminous mist, which hid from them surroundings of any inharmonious colour, and gave to all things the character of light. When it rained they were charmed, because they could remain indoors together all day with such a show of reason; when it was fine they were charmed, because they could sit together on the hills. They were like those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one.

Thomas Hardy

She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind - or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

Thomas Hardy

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.

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

I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.

Thomas Hardy

Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

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

Aggressive Fancy working spells Upon a mind o'erwrought.

Thomas Hardy

Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial globe.

Thomas Hardy

When false things are brought low, And swift things have grown slow, Feigning like froth shall go, Faith be for aye.

Thomas Hardy

That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgement Day.

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

If you are cheerful, and wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible.

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

This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I.

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

To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience.

Thomas Hardy

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

Thomas Hardy