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

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
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Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
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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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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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I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
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you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
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It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity
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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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All romances end at marriage.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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They spoke very little of their mutual feeling pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Thomas Hardy
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If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
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.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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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
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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