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

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
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Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
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And yet to every bad there is a worse.
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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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The defective can be more than the entire.
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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
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She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
Thomas Hardy
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She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.
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you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
Thomas Hardy
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The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
Thomas Hardy
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
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If we be doomed to marry, we marry if we be doomed to remain single we do.
Thomas Hardy
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She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.
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!
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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
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It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession
Thomas Hardy
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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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Done because we are too many.
Thomas Hardy