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Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

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
Symbolized
Lays
Beauty
Thing

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
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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A novel is an impression, not an argument and there the matter must rest.
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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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
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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Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
Thomas Hardy
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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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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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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
Thomas Hardy
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You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
Thomas Hardy
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If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
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
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War makes rattling good history.
Thomas Hardy
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Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Thomas Hardy
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Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
Thomas Hardy
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That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
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