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Thomas Hardy Quotes

1840–1928 England

Thomas Hardy OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist, short story writer and poet.

England
Novelists
Poets
Short story writers

Also known as: Hardy, Thomas

Random Thomas Hardy quote

134 quotes

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!

Jude the Obscure (1895)

Once you are there you'll be like a drop of water in a piece of rock crystal- your medium will dignify your commonness.

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.

Time's Laughingstocks (1909)

There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!

The Return of the Native (1878)

Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial globe.

The Return of the Native (1878)

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up, there will be you.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Con the dead page as ’twere live love: press on!
Cold wisdom’s words will ease thy track for thee.

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

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

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance—that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.

Moments of Vision (1917)

For winning love we win the risk of losing,
And losing love is as one's life were riven.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

The Return of the Native (1878)

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

The Dynasts (1904)

O memory, where is now my youth,
Who used to say that life was truth?

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

Man, without religion, is the creature of circumstances.

To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.

For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.

A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)

Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

One grievous failing of Elizabeth’s was her occasional pretty and picturesque use of dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Hardy (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.