Thomas Hardy Quotes
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...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line, less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.
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Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.
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Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
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The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
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I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
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Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.
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When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.
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...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.
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That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.
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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.
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The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
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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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Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.
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George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day—another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise.
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What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they come for me?" "Yes, dearest," he said. "They have come." "It is as it should be," she murmured. "Angel, I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!" She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved. "I am ready," she said quietly.
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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
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It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
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Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?
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We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.
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We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
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All romances end at marriage.
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Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.