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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

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

Delight Earth Enjoyment Fashion Happiness Light Myself
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
THOMAS HARDY

Beautiful Symbol
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Early Eyes Freedom Touch
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

Enough Feeling Happiness Natural Position Social
She moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
THOMAS HARDY

Bright Ideal Mental Sin
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
THOMAS HARDY

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

Beginning Better Path Worst
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Best Devotion Failure Greatness Kind Man Remember Selfish
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
THOMAS HARDY

Argument Custom Moral Poet
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
THOMAS HARDY

Constitution Herself Practice Principle Success
Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
THOMAS HARDY

Bed Death Grave Live Teaching
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
THOMAS HARDY

Experience Intense Life Measurement
To be loved to madness–such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
THOMAS HARDY

Desire Greatness Love Madness Passionate
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Herself Strength Strong Weakness Woman Worst
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Avoid Eyes Pain Path Sound Story
If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
THOMAS HARDY

Couple Love Marriage Relationship

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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