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Thomas Hardy Quotes | Quotes said by Thomas Hardy

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #1

    --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 Quote #2

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

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #3

    ...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 Quote #4

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

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #5

    A Cathedral Façade at Midnight

    Along the sculptures of the western wall
    I watched the moonlight creeping:
    It moved as if it hardly moved at all
    Inch by inch thinly peeping
    Round on the pious figures of freestone, brought
    And poised there when the Universe was wrought
    To serve its centre, Earth, in mankind’s thought.

    The lunar look skimmed scantly toe, breast, arm,
    Then edged on slowly, slightly,
    To shoulder, hand, face; till each austere form
    Was blanched its whole length brightly
    Of prophet, king, queen, cardinal in state,
    That dead men’s tools had striven to simulate;
    And the stiff images stood irradiate.

    A frail moan from the martyred saints there set
    Mid others of the erection
    Against the breeze, seemed sighings of regret
    At the ancient faith’s rejection
    Under the sure, unhasting, steady stress
    Of Reason’s movement, making meaningless.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #6

    [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 Quote #7

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

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #8

    A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #9

    A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #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 Quote #11

    Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man
    observing people listening to music. You say 'What are they
    regarding? Nothing is there.' But something is.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #12

    All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #13

    Always wanting another man than your own.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #14

    And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately chosen as a friend—or even for one of a group of a dozen friends—he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it all. How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the points in human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all that we hate? The man is really somebody we got to know by mere physical juxtaposition long maintained, and was taken into our confidence, and even heart, as a makeshift.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do 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 had any strength to throw away.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    Being a man not without a frequent consciousness that there was some charm in this life he led, he stood still after looking at the sky as a useful instrument, and regarded it in an appreciative spirit, as a work of art superlatively beautiful. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man. Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #21

    Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #22

    But I wish to be enlightened.'

    'Let me caution you against it.'

    'Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?'

    'Yes, indeed.'

    She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #23

    But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #24

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

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #25

    But you shouldn't have let her. That's the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high--innocent or guilty. She'd have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! It's all the same in the end! However, I think she's fond of her man still--whatever he med be of her. You were too quick about her. I shouldn't have let her go! I should have kept her chained on-- her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There's nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you've got the laws on your side. Moses knew.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

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

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #28

    Cultivate the art of renunciation.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #29

    Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct.

  • Thomas Hardy Quote #30

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

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