Thomas Hardy: Doing

“I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”

Thomas Hardy book Far from the Madding Crowd

Source: Far from the Madding Crowd

Love , Life

“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 book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

Success , Selfishness

“If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.”

Thomas Hardy Under the Greenwood Tree

Source: Under the Greenwood Tree

“Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

“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 book Jude the Obscure

Source: Jude the Obscure

Success , Dead

“So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.”

Thomas Hardy

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Change

“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!”

Thomas Hardy book Jude the Obscure

Pt. VI, ch. III
Jude the Obscure (1895)

“And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.”

Thomas Hardy

"Weathers", lines 15-18

Family

“A star looks down at me,
And says: "Here I and you
Stand each in our degree:
What do you mean to do,—
Mean to do?"”

Thomas Hardy

" Waiting Both http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/9302, lines 1-5, from Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)

Star

“But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that.”

Thomas Hardy book The Mayor of Casterbridge

Source: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Ch. 44

Wisdom , God , Way , Departure

“When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Bk. V, ch. 2
The Return of the Native (1878)

Life , Change

“Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more.”

Thomas Hardy book The Hand of Ethelberta

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 1

“Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Not from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.”

Thomas Hardy

" On a Fine Morning http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/16443" (1899), lines 1-7, from Poems of the Past and Present (1901)

Life , Dreams , Suffering , Time

“This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I.”

Thomas Hardy

" Weathers http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/2735, lines 10-11, from Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

Weather