Delve into the poetic and introspective world of Thomas Hardy through our curated collection of 100+ quotes. Hardy’s words are a window into the human experience, exploring themes of love, fate, nature, and the human spirit. Whether you’re a literature aficionado or seeking profound insights, these quotes offer a glimpse into Hardy’s timeless wisdom. Let his eloquent expressions inspire reflection, provoke thought, and deepen your understanding of the complexities of life, love, and the human condition.
Thomas Hardy quotes
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Some folk want their luck buttered.
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
Fear is the mother of foresight.
There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn’t there.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would.
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly..
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
I find that the best way of life is to keep on growing old, so that one becomes more and more experienced at dodging all the issues.
A man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
Afterwards, when one contemplates in the dusk the mirror-like surface of the pond, it is easy to fancy that something is ascending from the waters.
To know her was to love her.
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.
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
Happiness is but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
The sky was clear—remarkably clear—and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
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.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere.
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Heaven opened then, indeed. The consequences of his mistake stood vividly before him.
It is the curse of our modern education that it does not give sufficient stress to moral principles.
It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
He said hardly anything, but he kept my hand all the way.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
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.
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
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.
While I do live I’ll not forget that by great fortune I found at my birth a protectorate in the way of an ancient cradle and a sweet mother.
I have sometimes thought we can never give our children too much provision for the journey.
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
You look like the advertisement of a washing powder.
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
You look like the advertisement of a washing powder.
She had been awe’s disciple during twenty impressionable years, and had imbibed the teaching of her aunt much to her own behoof.
The most that people could say was that he would have been a good fellow if he had not been a family man.
I do hate him. But I love you.
She could show a certain sweetness toward little children and the weak brutes; yet, for the strong, there was hardly a fault she could not find, nor a virtue she could admire.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
She could show a certain sweetness toward little children and the weak brutes; yet, for the strong, there was hardly a fault she could not find, nor a virtue she could admire.
It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
He said hardly anything, but he kept my hand all the way.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
She looked back at him, and her eyes were like mocking-birds—as if they were capable of biting, and as if she were biting them.
I have not been a lover of the crying part of the game since my infancy.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Nobody could sleep unless they got drunk.
