Thomas Hardy Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. 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. Jude the Obscure

2. Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. The Mayor of Casterbridge

3. If Fancy's lips had been real cherries probably Dick's would have appeared deeply stained. Under the Greenwood Tree

4. Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Far From the Madding Crowd

5. So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky. Tess of the D’Urbervilles

6. Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know. Far From the Madding Crowd

7. That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime! Tess of the D’Urbervilles

8. You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all. A Pair of Blue Eyes

9. A volte mi pare di non aver desiderio di apprendere nulla di più di quel che già so.[...]A che mi serve sapere che sono solo un componente di una lunga schiera, trovar scritto in qualche vecchio libro di qualche creatura proprio simile a me e conoscere che reciterò la sua stessa parte, a rendermi infelice, ecco, solo a quello. La cosa migliore è dimenticare che la nostra natura e il nostro passato sono in tutto identici a quelli di migliaia e migliaia d'altri, e che il nostro futuro, le nostre azioni, saranno ancora uguali ad altre migliaia e migliaia. Mi piacerebbe sapere perché... perché il sole splende sul giusto e sull'ingiusto, allo stesso modo [...]Ma questo i libri non me lo sanno spiegare di certo.

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

11. 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. Tess of the D’Urbervilles

12. 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. Jude the Obscure

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

14. 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. A Pair of Blue Eyes

15. 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? Two on a Tower