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Two on a Tower QUOTES

Two on a Tower QUOTES

1 " But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

2 " But I wish to be enlightened.'

'Let me caution you against it.'

'Is enlightenment on the subject, then, so terrible?'

'Yes, indeed.'

She laughingly declared that nothing could have so piqued her curiosity as his statement. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

3 " So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were not made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything; nothing is made for man. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

4 " But time is short, and science is infinite... "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

5 " His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles; those were eyes which habitually gazed, not into the depths of other eyes, but into other worlds. Within his temples dwelt thoughts, not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

6 " I think astronomy is a bad study for you. It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

7 " You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison."

What monsters may they be?"

Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky... In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on!...

There is a size at which dignity begins," he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror? "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

8 " Within his temples felt thoughts not of woman's looks, but of stellar aspects and the configuration of constellations. Thus, to his physical attractiveness was added the attractiveness of mental inaccessibility. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

9 " At night, when human discords and harmonies are hushed, . . . there is nothing to moderate the blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder . . . Having got closer to immensity than their fellow-creatures, they saw at once its beauty and its frightfulness. They more and more felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which they had recklessly plunged, till they were oppressed with the presence of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung about them like a nightmare. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

10 " The inspection of these chasms brought him a second pulsation of that old horror which he had used to describe to Viviette as produced in him by bottomlessness in the north heaven. The ghostly finger of limitless vacancy touched him now on the other side. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

11 " Rural solitude, which provides ample themes for the intellect and sweet occupations innumerable for the minor sentiments, often denies a ready object for those stronger passions that enter no less than the others into the human constitution. The suspended pathos finds its remedy in settling on the first intrusive shape that happens to be reasonably well organized for the purpose, disregarding social and other minor accessories. Where the solitude is shadowed by the secret melancholies of the solitary, this natural law is still surer in operation. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

12 " There was a certain scientific practicability even in his love-making, and it here came out excellently.  "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

13 " Like a certain philosopher I would, upon my soul, have all young men from eighteen to twenty-five kept under barrels; seeing how often, in the lack of some such sequestering process, the woman sits down before each as his destiny, and too frequently enervates his purpose, till he abandons the most promising course ever conceived! "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

14 " It was mid-May time, bringing with it weather not, perhaps, quite so blooming as that assumed to be natural to the month by the joyous poets of three hundred years ago; but a very tolerable, well-wearing May, that the average rustic would willingly have compounded for in lieu of Mays occasionally fairer, but usually more foul. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

15 " Your eyes are to be my stars for the future. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

16 " Music drew an angel down, said the poet: but what is that to drawing down worlds! "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

17 " This was an even more unknown tract of the unknown. Space here, being less the historic haunt of human thought than overhead at home, seemed to be pervaded with a more lonely loneliness. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

18 " The vivid circumstances of his life at this date led him ever to remember the external scenes inwhich they were set. It was an evening of phenomenal irridations, and the west heaven gleamed like a foundry of all metals common and rare. The clouds were broken into a thousand fragments, and the margin of every fragment shone. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

19 " Swithin had, in fact, arisen as an attractive little intervention between herself and despair. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower

20 " On the contrary, you speak so beautifully that I could listen all day.'

The astronomer threw a searching glance upon her for a moment; but there was no satire in the warm soft eyes which met his own with a luxurious contemplative interest. 'Say more of it to me,' she continued, in a voice not far removed from coaxing. "

― Thomas Hardy , Two on a Tower