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

More quotes by 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
Image
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
Thomas Hardy
Image
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
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
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
Image
Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
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
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Thomas Hardy
Image
- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
Thomas Hardy
Image
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
Thomas Hardy
Image
There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
Thomas Hardy
Image
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
Thomas Hardy
Image
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.
Thomas Hardy
Image
We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
Thomas Hardy
Image
War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
Image
Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
Thomas Hardy
Image
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
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
War makes rattling good history.
Thomas Hardy
Image
My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella)
Thomas Hardy