Top 186 Quotes & Sayings by Thomas Hardy

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Thomas Hardy.

Last updated on December 23, 2024.

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England.

English - Novelist | June 2, 1840 - January 11, 1928

Source: Wikipedia

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

Thomas Hardy

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

Thomas Hardy

There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.

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

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

Thomas Hardy

The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

Thomas Hardy

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

Thomas Hardy

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.

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

Some folk want their luck buttered.

Thomas Hardy

No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.

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

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

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

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

Thomas Hardy

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Thomas Hardy

And yet to every bad there is a worse.

Thomas Hardy

That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.

Thomas Hardy

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Thomas Hardy

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.

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

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

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

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

Thomas Hardy

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.

Thomas Hardy

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

Fear is the mother of foresight.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

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.

Thomas Hardy

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

Thomas Hardy

Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes

Thomas Hardy

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

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.

Thomas Hardy

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Thomas Hardy

Pessimism is 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

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

Thomas Hardy

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

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

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Thomas Hardy

Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

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

Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.

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

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

Thomas Hardy

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

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.