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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
Morals
Invent
Moral
Story
True
Tellers
Stories
Parables
Good
Troubled
Decency

More quotes by 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.
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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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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
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I agree to the conditions, Angel because you know best what my punishment ought to be only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!
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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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She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.
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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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Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
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He wished she knew his impressions but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
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War makes rattling good history.
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If we be doomed to marry, we marry if we be doomed to remain single we do.
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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.
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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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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
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I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
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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.
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It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
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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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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
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