200+ Quotes & Sayings By Thomas Hardy

At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then-- I don't know how it was-- I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you. Thomas Hardy

I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don't know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man's heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go unlamented to her grave. 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

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

Jude leaped out of arm's reach, and walked along the trackway weeping--not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life. 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

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men. Thomas Hardy

The world is as it used to be:“ All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters.“ That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening..“ Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need). 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

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

The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain. Thomas Hardy

You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison." What monsters may they be?" Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky.. In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on! .. There is a size at which dignity begins, " he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror? . Thomas Hardy

I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one or two of them particularly-- almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man-- no man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. . Thomas Hardy

Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.. Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression. Thomas Hardy

As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them–the part of–who is it?– Venus Urania. . 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

Joan Durbeyfield always manged to find consolation somewhere: 'Well, as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump car aright. And if he don't marry her afore he will after. For that he's all afire wi' love for her any eye can see.' 'What's her trump card? Her d' Urberville blood, you mean?' 'No, stupid; her face - as 'twas mine. 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

[She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait. Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they. 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 licence to receive it. Thomas Hardy

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no – they were not perfect. And 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

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things. 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

On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn – at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken. Thomas Hardy

Tess was awake before dawn – at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken. Thomas Hardy

And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man’s finer emotions, and her lack of interest in his aspirations. Thomas Hardy

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But 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

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do. Thomas Hardy

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

..the social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.. Thomas Hardy

This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam. Thomas Hardy

It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one. Thomas Hardy

Life with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you-- I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there's never any knowing what a man med do-- you'll have the sticks o' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief. Thomas Hardy

The flowers in the bride’s hand are sadly like the garland which decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times! ”“ Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man. That’s what some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he is only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him. Thomas Hardy

I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal. Thomas Hardy

I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly ! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick.... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say! Thomas Hardy

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore. Thomas Hardy

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

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times. Thomas Hardy

Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm. Thomas Hardy

Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then. Thomas Hardy

...there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him. Thomas Hardy

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

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

She felt powerless to withstand or deny him. He was altogether too much for her, and Bathsheba seemed as one who, facing a reviving wind, finds it to blow so strongly that it stops the breath. 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

Done because we are too many. Thomas Hardy

Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em? Thomas Hardy

I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about! Thomas Hardy

He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break. Thomas Hardy

I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all. Thomas Hardy

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; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman's part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba's position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off. Thomas Hardy

It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man-- that question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing at the present moment in these uprising times-- whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and re-shape his course accordingly. I tried to do the latter, and I failed. But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays-- I mean, not by their essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes. If I had ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature! ' But having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!. Thomas Hardy

I have been thinking that the social moulds civilisation fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.. Thomas Hardy

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society. Thomas Hardy

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in. Thomas Hardy

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

I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give pleasure to those I love best. There, gentlemen, since you wanted to know how I was getting on, I have told you. Much good may it do you! I cannot explain further here. I perceive there is something wrong somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever discover it-- at least in our time. 'For who knoweth what is good for man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him under the sun? . Thomas Hardy

But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is. Thomas Hardy

As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray. Thomas Hardy

She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects. Thomas Hardy

It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet. Thomas Hardy

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

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you. Thomas Hardy

This good-fellowship–camaraderie–usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Thomas Hardy

Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf manobserving people listening to music. You say 'What are theyregarding? Nothing is there.' But something is. Thomas Hardy

It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers. Thomas Hardy

Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain. She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. . Thomas Hardy

I don’t want to see landscapes, i.e. scenic paintings of them, because I don’t want to see the original realities — as optical effects that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings. The ‘simply natural’ is interesting no longer. Thomas Hardy

When the love-led man had ceased from his labours Bathsheba came and looked him in the face.' Gabriel, will you you stay on with me?' she said, smiling winningly, and not troubling to bring her lips quite together again at the end, because there was going to be another smile soon.' I will, ' said Gabriel.And she smiled on him again. Thomas Hardy

Always wanting another man than your own. Thomas Hardy

Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike. Thomas Hardy

Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory. Thomas Hardy

But you are too lovely even to care to be kind as others are. Thomas Hardy

The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given. Thomas Hardy

Though fervent was our vow, Though ruddily ran our pleasure, Bliss has fulfilled its measure, And sees its sentence now. Ache deep; but make no moans: Smile out; but stilly suffer: The paths of love are rougher Than thoroughfares of stones. Thomas Hardy

Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence. Thomas Hardy

When I want a broad-minded opinion for general enlightenment, distinct from special advice, I never go to a man who deals in the subject professionally. So I like the parson's opinion on law, the lawyer's on doctoring, the doctor's on business, and my business-man's .. . on morals. Thomas Hardy

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting outof love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as ashort cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Thomas Hardy

Don't that make your bosom plim? 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 Thomas Hardy

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him. Thomas Hardy

And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape. Thomas Hardy

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play Thomas Hardy