Thomas Hardy Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

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

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

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

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“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.”

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy Quotes about love

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

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.”

Source: The 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.”

Source: Return of the Native

“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.”

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.”

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

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

Thomas Hardy: Trending quotes

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

Source: The Personal Notebooks Of Thomas Hardy

“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!”

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

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

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

Thomas Hardy Quotes

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

Source: The Return of the Native

“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.”

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“All romances end at marriage.”

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“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.”

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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

Thomas Hardy book The Hand of Ethelberta

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 20

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

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