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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.

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

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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.
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I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
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There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
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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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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.
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
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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.
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Done because we are too many.
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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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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.
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Bless thy simplicity, Tess
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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.
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Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
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Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.
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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!
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Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
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Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
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Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
Thomas Hardy
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
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