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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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Always wanting another man than your own.
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
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In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
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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It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
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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Some women's love of being loved is insatiable and so, often, is their love of loving and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.
Thomas Hardy
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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
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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If we be doomed to marry, we marry if we be doomed to remain single we do.
Thomas Hardy
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Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
Thomas Hardy
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There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.
Thomas Hardy
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It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession
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
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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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That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity!
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.
Thomas Hardy
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War makes rattling good history.
Thomas Hardy
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Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
Thomas Hardy