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If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

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
Worst
Path
Full
Better
Look
Looks
Anarchy
Begins
Acceptance

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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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.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
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!
Thomas Hardy
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Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
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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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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Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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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!
Thomas Hardy
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Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
Thomas Hardy
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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.
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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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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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
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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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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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
Thomas Hardy
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Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Thomas Hardy
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She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
Thomas Hardy