Quote

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.

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
Character
Impulse
Done
Aim
Things
Lays
Achievement
Willed
Among
Impulses
Beauty
Aims
History
Achievements
True
Ugliness

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

Image
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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.
Thomas Hardy
Image
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Thomas Hardy
Image
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
Thomas Hardy
Image
To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.
Thomas Hardy
Image
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
Thomas Hardy
Image
You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
Thomas Hardy
Image
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
Image
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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
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
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
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
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
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
Image
If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
Thomas Hardy