How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
Wine enters through the mouth,Love, the eyes.I raise the glass to my mouth,I look at you,I sigh.
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress
Before me floats an image, man or shade,Shade more than man, more image than a shade;For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-clothMay unwind the winding path;A mouth that has no moisture and no breathBreathless mouths may summon;(“Byzantium”)
Come away, O human child!To the waters and the wildWith a faery, hand in hand,For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
I bring you with reverent handsThe books of my numberless dreams.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
I spit into the face of Time That has transfigured me.
How far away the stars seem, and how farIs our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!
I said: ‘A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. (“The Adoration of The Magi”)
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dr
One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one’s dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.
I carry the Sun in a Golden Cup, the Moon in a Silver Bag.
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,For I would ride with you upon the wind,Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one,Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is saidIt was the dream itself enchanted me(“The Circus Animal’s Desertion”)
We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
Round these men stories tended to group themselves, sometimes deserting more ancient heroes for the purpose. Round poets have they gathered especially, for poetry in Ireland has always been mysteriously connected with magic.
Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair.
Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.
I heard the old, old, men say ‘all that’s beautiful drifts away, like the waters.
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping…I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one;Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth.
I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Labour is blossoming or dancing whereThe body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
O bid me mount and sail up thereAmid the cloudy wrack,For Peg and Meg and Paris’ loveThat had so straight a back,Are gone away, and some that stayHave changed their silk for sack.