110+ Thomas Hardy Quotes On Happiness, Death And Nature

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. He is best known for his novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, and Jude the Obscure. His works often focus on the decline of rural life and the displacement of traditional values in the face of the Industrial Revolution. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thomas Hardy on love, happiness, death.

Top 10 Thomas Hardy Quotes

1. Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
2. To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
3. O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
4. Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
5. The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.
6. The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
7. Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.
8. I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
9. And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak
10. 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 Short Quotes

• The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
• A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
• We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
• That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
• Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
• Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
• Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
• Some folk want their luck buttered.
• If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
• If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.

Thomas Hardy Quotes About Love

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

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

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. — Thomas Hardy

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

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

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. — Thomas Hardy

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

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms. — Thomas Hardy

You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman! — Thomas Hardy

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. — Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes About Life

Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play. — Thomas Hardy

Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently? — Thomas Hardy

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length. — Thomas Hardy

Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe. — Thomas Hardy

Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king. — Thomas Hardy

People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort. — Thomas Hardy

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted! — Thomas Hardy

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. — Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes About Nature

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. — 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

Well: what we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business we perceive it all to be -- and the non-necessity of it. — Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes About Face

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on. — Thomas Hardy

He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears. — Thomas Hardy

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. — Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy Quotes About Express

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

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own. — Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity. — Thomas Hardy

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime! — Thomas Hardy

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible. — Thomas Hardy

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing. — Thomas Hardy

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables? — Thomas Hardy

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. — Thomas Hardy

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle. — Thomas Hardy

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker. — Thomas Hardy

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized. — Thomas Hardy

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. — Thomas Hardy

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years. — Thomas Hardy

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it. — Thomas Hardy

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

you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness. — Thomas Hardy

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so? — Thomas Hardy

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones") — Thomas Hardy

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. — Thomas Hardy

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity! — Thomas Hardy

War makes rattling good history. — Thomas Hardy

To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was. — Thomas Hardy

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

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight. — Thomas Hardy

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all. — Thomas Hardy

Once victim, always victim -- that's the law! — Thomas Hardy

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

Fear is the mother of foresight. — Thomas Hardy

...he seemed to approach the grave as an 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

- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man. — Thomas Hardy

If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst. — Thomas Hardy

War makes good history but peace is poor reading. — Thomas Hardy

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. — Thomas Hardy

Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king. — Thomas Hardy

To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road. — Thomas Hardy

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. — Thomas Hardy

Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening. — Thomas Hardy

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order — Thomas Hardy

Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting MightThat fashioned forth its lovelinessHad other aims than my delight. — Thomas Hardy

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

But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes. — Thomas Hardy

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

Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter? — Thomas Hardy

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. — Thomas Hardy

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you. — 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

Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store? — Thomas Hardy

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong. — Thomas Hardy

My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella) — Thomas Hardy

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? — Thomas Hardy

But no one came. Because no one ever does. — Thomas Hardy

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope. — Thomas Hardy

Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition. — Thomas Hardy

Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one — Thomas Hardy

Always wanting another man than your own. — Thomas Hardy

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new. — Thomas Hardy

Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin. — Thomas Hardy

Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'. — Thomas Hardy

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage. — Thomas Hardy

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

If all hearts were open and all desires known -- as they would be if people showed their souls -- how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place! — Thomas Hardy

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world. — 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

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know. — Thomas Hardy

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky. — Thomas Hardy

Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. — Thomas Hardy

By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? — Thomas Hardy

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain. — Thomas Hardy

There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating. — Thomas Hardy

Life Lessons by Thomas Hardy

1. Thomas Hardy's works often explore the struggles of individuals against the impersonal forces of fate and society, reminding us to stay true to our own values and beliefs despite external pressures.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of accepting the inevitable and living life to its fullest, teaching us to appreciate the beauty of life's moments and to find joy in the little things.
3. Finally, Hardy's works often explore the power of love, reminding us to be open to love and to cherish the relationships we have with those around us.