The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

Education is not the filling of the pail, but, the lighting of the fire.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

When we are young we long to tread a way none have trod before

If I make the lashes darkAnd the eyes more brightAnd the lips more scarlet,Or ask if all be rightFrom mirror after mirror,No vanity’s displayed:I’m looking for the face I hadBefore the world was made.

Who mocks at music mocks at love.

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,The soul recovers radical innocenceAnd learns at last that it is self-delighting,Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.

The ghost of Roger Casement is beating on the door.

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

I would mould a world of fire and dew.

The problem with some people is that when they aren’t drunk, they’re sober.

O love is the crooked thing,There is nobody wise enoughTo find out all that is in it.

I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw –Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.

Time’s bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace; think where man’s...

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

To be born woman is to know — although they do not speak of it at school — women must labor to be beautiful.

Time drops in decay,Like a candle burnt out,And the mountains and woodsHave their day, have their day;

May she be granted beauty and yet notBeauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,Being made beautiful overmuch,Consider beauty a sufficient end,Lose natural kindness and maybeThe heart-revealing intimacyThat chooses right,...

Our words must seem to be inevitable.

Once more the storm is howling, and half hidUnder this cradle-hood and coverlidMy child sleeps on.

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a man’s eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of...

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

Time’s bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.

Nothing but sweetness can remain when hearts are full of their own sweetness.

Cast a cold eyeOn life, on deathHorseman, pass by!

Well, to see rightly is the whole of wisdom, whatever dream be with us.

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

I agree about Shaw – he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, and what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power...

Who can tell the dancer from the dance?

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams into a common light of common hours, until old age bring the red flare again.

In Imagination only we find a Human Faculty that touches nature at one side, and spirit on the other. Imagination may be described as that which is sent bringing spirit to nature, entering into nature,...

When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

when sleepers wake and yet still dream

In dreams begin responsibility

Others because you did not keepThat deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;Yet always when I look death in the face,When I clamber to the heights of sleep,Or when I grow excited with wine,Suddenly I...

Words alone are certain good.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

we can make our minds so still like water. That beings gather about us to see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even with a fiercer life because...