Quote

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

Thomas Hardy

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
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.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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.
Thomas Hardy
Image
The defective can be more than the entire.
Thomas Hardy
Image
War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
Thomas Hardy
Image
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind , a dog's fidelity!
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
They spoke very little of their mutual feeling pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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