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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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There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
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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.
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The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
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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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We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
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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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Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
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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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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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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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There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.
Thomas Hardy
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Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Thomas Hardy
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You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
Thomas Hardy
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Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
Thomas Hardy
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Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Thomas Hardy
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If we be doomed to marry, we marry if we be doomed to remain single we do.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
Thomas Hardy
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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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