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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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And yet to every bad there is a worse.
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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My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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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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The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
Thomas Hardy
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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
Thomas Hardy
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Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
Thomas Hardy
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
Thomas Hardy
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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.
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.
Thomas Hardy
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To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
Thomas Hardy
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If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
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.
Thomas Hardy
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.
Thomas Hardy
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All romances end at marriage.
Thomas Hardy
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Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
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