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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
True
Tellers
Stories
Parables
Good
Troubled
Decency
Morals
Invent
Moral
Story

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
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I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
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If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
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We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
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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.
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Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
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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.
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That aspects are within us and who seems Most kingly is the King.
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Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
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Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.
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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.
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To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
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Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
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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.
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That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.
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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
Thomas Hardy
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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