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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

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
The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
THOMAS HARDY

Age Development Early Friendship Job Man Old Performance Reach Value
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
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
THOMAS HARDY

Failure Marriage Observation Path People Regular
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
You have never loved me as I love you–never–never! Yours is not a passionate heart–your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite– not a woman!
THOMAS HARDY

Burn Flame Heart Love Myself Passion Woman Yourself
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
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?
THOMAS HARDY

Distance Man See Woman
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
THOMAS HARDY

Dreams Small Surround
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
THOMAS HARDY

Afraid Heart Trouble
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.
THOMAS HARDY

Body Remark Sky Stars Time
There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.
THOMAS HARDY

Eat Friendship Music
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

Believe Capability Childhood Love Myself Nature Possession Protection
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
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
THOMAS HARDY

Moral Reason Wrong
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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