The quotations of

Thomas Hardy

English novelist and poet

1840–1928

25 quotes, most often on Love, Morality and Marriage.

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.
Jude the Obscure (1895), Part First: At Marygreen, Chapter XIIn context
- Marriage
Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!
Jude the Obscure (1895), Part Fifth: At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere, Chapter VIIIIn context
- Good & Evil
- Nature
Experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the Third: The Rally, Chapter XIXIn context
- Experience
The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the Sixth: The Convert, Chapter XLIXIn context
- Character
In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the First: The Maiden, Chapter VIn context
- Love
- Time
Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way, and you did not help me!
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the Second: Maiden No More, Chapter XIIIn context
- Men
- Reading
Once victim, always victim⁠—that’s the law!
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the Sixth: The Convert, Chapter XLVIIIn context
- Justice
Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony.
Jude the Obscure (1895), Part First: At Marygreen, Chapter IIIn context
- Maturity
- Nature
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.
Jude the Obscure (1895), Part First: At Marygreen, Chapter IIIn context
- Maturity
- Youth
I am in a chaos of principles⁠—groping in the dark⁠—acting by instinct and not after example. Eight or nine years ago when I came here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am.
Jude the Obscure (1895), Part Sixth: At Christminster Again, Chapter IIn context
- Experience
- Morality

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