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

Thomas Hardy

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Thomas Hardy
Age: 87 †
Born: 1840
Born: June 2
Died: 1928
Died: January 28
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Dorset
Good
Troubled
Decency
Morals
Invent
Moral
Story
True
Tellers
Stories
Parables

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
Thomas Hardy
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It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.
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They spoke very little of their mutual feeling pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
Thomas Hardy
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We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
Thomas Hardy
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
Thomas Hardy
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It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity
Thomas Hardy
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The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
Thomas Hardy
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That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.
Thomas Hardy
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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
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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
Thomas Hardy
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Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
Thomas Hardy
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That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity!
Thomas Hardy
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I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on.
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Thomas Hardy
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I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy