“Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.”
Pt. I, ch. XI
Jude the Obscure (1895)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Thomas Hardy 171
English novelist and poet 1840–1928Related quotes

Diary entry (1820), as quoted in The Diary of John Quincy Adams (1951), by John Quincy Adams, Scribner's Sons, New York, p. 228-229 http://web.archive.org/web/20130703084250/http://home.nas.com/lopresti/ps6.htm

Source: Scoundrel Time (1976), p. 82
Context: To many intellectuals the radicals had become the chief, perhaps the only, enemy. … Not alone because the radical's reasons were suspect but because his convictions would lead to a world that deprived the rest of us of what we had. Very few people were capable of admitting anything so simple. But the antiradical camp contained the same divisions: often they were honest and thoughtful men, often they were men who turned down a dark road for dark reasons.
But radicalism or anti-radicalism should have had nothing to do with the sly, miserable methods of McCarthy, Nixon and colleagues, as they flailed at Communists, near-Communists, and nowhere-near Communists. Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help. Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Quoted in Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-schwartz/in-the-beginning-there-was-not_b_1703387.html

“Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.”
Pt. I line 83-84.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 427.

“A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.”
Source: The Master of Go (1951), Ch. 38, p. 164.
Context: That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 13

“You can still function as a living ruin.”
Source: Solipsist