Thomas Hardy Quotes (171 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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The Woodlanders

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy: 171 quotes 22 likes

Famous Thomas Hardy Quotes

“Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.”

Thomas Hardy

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge

“I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

“A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”

Thomas Hardy

Variant: When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy Quotes about love

“She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Source: The Return of the Native

“A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Source: The Return of the Native

“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Return of the Native

“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 book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

“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 book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

“Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.”

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy: Trending quotes

“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: The Personal Notebooks Of Thomas Hardy

“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Source: The Return of the Native

“I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon…. O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing —
Not even I — would undo me so!”

Thomas Hardy

" The Going http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/2716" (1912), lines 38-42, from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

Soul , Dead

Thomas Hardy Quotes

“If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Truth

“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

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Life , Fear , Light , Waiting

“All romances end at marriage.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Marriage

“Her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. 45 (last lines)

Pain , Youth , Sense , Strong

“To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. I, ch. 7
The Return of the Native (1878)

Beauty , Study , Wedding , Suffering

“A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. III, ch. 2
The Return of the Native (1878)

Happiness

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

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Variant: They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Feeling

“Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.”

Thomas Hardy

" In Time of 'The Breaking Of Nations'" http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/poems/breaking.html (1915), lines 1-12, from Moments of Vision (1917); the title is derived from lines of Jeremiah 51:20: "Thou art my battle ax and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations."
Context: p>Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.</p

Horse

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

Thomas Hardy book The Hand of Ethelberta

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 20

Lovers

“War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.”

Thomas Hardy