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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

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The defective can be more than the entire.
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There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
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We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.
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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
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If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
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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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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.
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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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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
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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.
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The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.
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Done because we are too many.
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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A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
Thomas Hardy
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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!
Thomas Hardy
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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
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Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
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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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