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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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Thomas Hardy
Age: 87 †
Born: 1840
Born: June 2
Died: 1928
Died: January 28
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Dorset
Quite
Making
Often
Insignificance
Away
Oblivion
Spirit
Spirits
Good
Indispensable
Men
Lacking
Thin

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She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
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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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There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
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Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
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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.
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Done because we are too many.
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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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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.
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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
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The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
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So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
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They spoke very little of their mutual feeling pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
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Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
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