"Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain."
— Thomas Hardy

"While much is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened."
— Thomas Hardy

"People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort."
— Thomas Hardy

"But no one came. Because no one ever does."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"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 (The Return of the Native)

"A man's silence is wonderful to listen to."
— Thomas Hardy

"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
"Yes."
"All like ours?"
"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
"A blighted one."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"...it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person's lover. There would be a much likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There'd be little cooling then."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"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 (Jude the Obscure)

"Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?"
— Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native)

"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 (Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Classic Collection)

"I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don't know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man's heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go unlamented to her grave."
— Thomas Hardy

"This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?"
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"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

"She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will."
— Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native)

"Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it."
— Thomas Hardy

"Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?"
— Thomas Hardy

"Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?"
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so."
— Thomas Hardy

"There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating."
— Thomas Hardy (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not."
— Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd)

"There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness."
— Thomas Hardy (A Pair of Blue Eyes)

"There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child."
— Thomas Hardy (The Woodlanders)

"That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

- Eustacia in The Return of the Native"
— Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native)

"To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature."
— Thomas Hardy (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"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 (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do."
— Thomas Hardy (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?"
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"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. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst."
— Thomas Hardy

""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?""
— Thomas Hardy (Two On A Tower)

"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. Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a close interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties,disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you." -Gabriel Oak"
— Thomas Hardy

"To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was."
— Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native)

"That man's silence is wonderful to listen to"
— Thomas Hardy

"...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

"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."
— Thomas Hardy (Jude the Obscure)

"How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!"
— Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native)

"And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will."
— Thomas Hardy

"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about [history] than I know already. [...] Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only--finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and you past doings have been kist like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'. [...] I shouldn't mind learning why--why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike, [...] but that's what books will not tell me."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of tears, which seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a quick good-night to these sincere and simple souls whom he loved so well; who knew neither the world, the flesh, or the devil in their own hearts; only as something vague and external to themselves. He went to his own chamber.
His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare opened it to discover her standing without, with anxious eyes.
"Angel," she asked, "is there something wrong that you must go away so soon? I am quite certain you are not yourself."
"I am not, quite, mother," said he.
"About her? Now, my son, I know it is that--I know it is about her! Have you quarreled in these three weeks?"
"We have not exactly quarreled," he said. "But we have had a difference--"
"Angel--is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?"
With a mother's instinct Mrs. Clare had put her finger on the kind of trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her son.
"She is spotless!" he replied; and he felt that if it had sent him to eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie. "
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store? "
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire. "
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"Because we were to many."
— Thomas Hardy

"Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done."
— Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native)

"...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness."
— Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

"Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight."
— Thomas Hardy