Quotes by Thomas Hardy

About Thomas Hardy:

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, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

What a grand revenge you have taken! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you. Four years after, you find me a Christian enthusiast; you then work upon me, perhaps to my complete perdition! But Tess, my coz, as I used to call you, this is only my way o...

Thomas Hardy

Better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.

Thomas Hardy

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...

Thomas Hardy

People who have always gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong.

Thomas Hardy

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.

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

You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.

Thomas Hardy

If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways—not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways.

Thomas Hardy

How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them?

Thomas Hardy

He's the man we were in search of, that's true, and yet he's not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.

Thomas Hardy

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

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

Tell him everything; it is best. He will forgive you.

Thomas Hardy

When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand - she's as good as any other; they be all alike in groundwork: 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference.

Thomas Hardy

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

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

If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained.

Thomas Hardy

It was the week after Easter holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the light spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as they steamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled season shone on the grass w...

Thomas Hardy

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

Thomas Hardy

Author Bio

  • NameThomas Hardy
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist and poet
  • BornJune 2, 1840
  • DiedJanuary 11, 1928
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionPoet; Writer; Novelist
  • WorksTess Of The D'Urbervilles; Far From The Madding Crowd; Jude The Obscure
  • AwardsOrder Of Merit