Quotes from Tess of the Ubervilles | Thomas Hardy

Below are some quotes from the book Tess of the Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy:

• 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.
• Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
• 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.
• 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. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a close interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; part and counterpart wandered independently about the earth in the stupidest manner for a while, till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes -- what was called a strange destiny.
• It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity”
• How can I pray for you, when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter his plans on my account?
• She looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of innocence.