Without a doubt, Thomas Hardy was one of the most accomplished and admired Victorian English novelists and poets who came up with the legendary English novels, ‘Tess of the D’Ubervilles’, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’, ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ and ‘Jude the Obscure’. Most of his novels revolved around tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, set in the backdrop of semi-fictional region of Wessex. Though Hardy is best remembered today as a novelist, he primarily considered himself a poet first. Despite this, his first collection of poem came in only in 1898 as ‘Wessex Poems’. Though the poems were not well received then, it was later that Hardy’s poetry cast an important influence on the 1950s and 1960s poets. In his works, Hardy was highly critical of much in Victorian society, focusing more on a declining rural society. He mostly used a traditionalist technique and explored a fatalist outlook against the dark rugged landscape. Just as his novels and poetry, Hardy’s quotes are equally famous and popular. They touch various genres of life, from love to religion, time to travel and so on and give a new perspective to life. Browse through this section and explore quotes by Thomas Hardy.
Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
Thomas Hardy
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
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
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Thomas Hardy
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
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.
...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes
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!
She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.
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
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.
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.
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...
Thomas Hardy
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Thomas Hardy
If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
Thomas Hardy
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
Thomas Hardy
Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?
It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession
Thomas Hardy
...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
Thomas Hardy
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
Thomas Hardy
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.
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
But some women only require an emergency to make them fit for one.
Thomas Hardy
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.
Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
Thomas Hardy
If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.
Thomas Hardy
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
Thomas Hardy
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
Thomas Hardy
Love, though added emotion, is substracted capacity
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
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
Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds
Thomas Hardy
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
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.
Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Thomas Hardy
Good, better, best
Never let it rest,
Till ur good is better
And better is best.
Thomas Hardy
Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
Thomas Hardy
Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
--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
Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
Thomas Hardy
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
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
They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they.
Thomas Hardy
You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it.
