“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.”
" On a Fine Morning http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/16443" (1899), lines 1-7, from Poems of the Past and Present (1901)
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Thomas Hardy 171
English novelist and poet 1840–1928Related quotes

Sylvie and Bruno (1889)
Context: p>Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?Bowed to the earth with bitter woe
Or laughing at some raree-show
We flutter idly to and fro.Man's little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.</p

Source: Discipleship (1937), Discipleship and the Cross, p. 86.
Context: The cross is not random suffering, but necessary suffering. The cross is not suffering that stems from natural existence; it is the suffering that comes from being Christian. … A Christianity that no longer took discipleship seriously remade the gospel into only the solace of cheap grace. Moreover, it drew no line between natural and Christian existence. Such a Christianity had to understand the cross as one's daily misfortune, as the predicament and anxiety of our daily life. Here it has been forgotten that the cross also means being rejected, that the cross includes the shame of suffering. Being shunned, despised, and deserted by people, as in the psalmists unending lament, is an essential feature of the suffering of the cross, which cannot be comprehended by a Christianity that is unable to differentiate between a citizen's ordinary existence and a Christian existence. The cross is suffering with Christ.

Source: The Conquest of Fear (1921), Chapter III : God And His Self-Expression, § VIII
Context: I was to see myself as God's Self-Expression working with others who were also His Self-Expression to the same extent as I. It was in the fact of our uniting together to produce His Self-Expression that I was to look for my security. No one could effectively work against me while I was consciously trying to work with God. Moreover, it was probable that no one was working against me, or had any intention of working against me, but that my own point of view being wrong I had put the harmonious action of my life out of order. Suspicion always being likely to see what it suspects the chances were many that I was creating the very thing I suffered from.
This does not mean that in our effort to reproduce harmonious action we should shut our eyes to what is evidently wrong, or blandly ignore what is plainly being done to our disadvantage. Of course not! One uses all the common-sense methods of getting justice for oneself and protecting one's own interests. But it does mean that when I can no longer protect my own interests, when my affairs depend upon others far more than on myself — a condition in which we all occasionally find ourselves — I am not to fret myself, not to churn my spirit into nameless fears. I am not a free agent. Those with whom I am associated are not free agents. God is the one supreme command. He expresses Himself through me; He expresses Himself through them; we all.

Fourteen Black Paintings
Song lyrics, Us (1992)