Thomas Hardy Quotes
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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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Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only - finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'.
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When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.
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Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
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But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
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The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")
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This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.
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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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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.
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one.
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...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes.
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
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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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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
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I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
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In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving.
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It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
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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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Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds.
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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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The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies.
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You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.