Thomas Hardy Quotes
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
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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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The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
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You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
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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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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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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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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
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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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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one.
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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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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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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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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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Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.
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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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Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what tomorrow has in store?
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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.
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The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
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Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.
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A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.