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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
Lays
Beauty
Thing
Symbolized

More quotes by 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 a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
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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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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Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Thomas Hardy
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
Thomas Hardy
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Done because we are too many.
Thomas Hardy
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- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
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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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
Thomas Hardy
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Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Thomas Hardy
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
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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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.
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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There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
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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If we be doomed to marry, we marry if we be doomed to remain single we do.
Thomas Hardy
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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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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy