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You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

Thomas Hardy

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
THOMAS HARDY

Cruelty Different Fate Hope Indulgence Love Obstacle Sad
Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.
THOMAS HARDY

Better Children Disappoint Game Life Lose Play Possible Worst
Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it.
THOMAS HARDY

Generosity License Love Woman
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
THOMAS HARDY

Difference Heaven Man Object Religion
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
THOMAS HARDY

Love Lover
Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.
THOMAS HARDY

Feeling Impression Power Remark Silence Soul Speech
So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.
THOMAS HARDY

Distance Dreams Hope Privacy Soul Sun
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
THOMAS HARDY

Live Mental Togetherness
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
THOMAS HARDY

Reflection Work
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
THOMAS HARDY

Love One Liner Possible Strength Weakness
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Adventure Dreams Emotion Happiness Universe
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
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
THOMAS HARDY

Disappoint Fulfillment Hope Leaving Remove
Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.
THOMAS HARDY

Fate Man Villain
I wish I had never been born–there or anywhere else.
THOMAS HARDY

Born Fantasy
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

Beautiful Bird Eyes Learning Sing Sweet Terrible
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
THOMAS HARDY

Afraid Heart Trouble
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
THOMAS HARDY

Business Novel Poet Sorry
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
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

Death Life Love Myself
That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.
THOMAS HARDY

Listening Man Silence Wonderful
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Drama Experience Happiness Impression Leadership Learning Life Live Placement Subject
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Death Goodness Illustration Moral Story Success
Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.
THOMAS HARDY

Attraction Listening Man Silence Woman
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
THOMAS HARDY

Fall In Love Hide Justice Myself Relationship Reveal Wrong Yourself
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
People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort.
THOMAS HARDY

Comfortable Force Happiness Marriage Natural People Resistance

You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

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You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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