"While there's life there's hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe." - Thomas Hardy

To be lectured because the lecturer saw her in the cold morning light of open-shuttered disillusion was exasperating.

Distinction doesn't consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those whose are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report

On a Fine Morning”
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

WHENCE comes Solace? — Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

This do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its iris-hued embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.