Quote collection
591 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span; Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man; Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain."
"An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives."
"I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun."
"Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war?"
"The women that I picked spoke sweet and low And yet gave tongue. "Hound voices" were they all."
"I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown."
"In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse."
"But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face."
". . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death"
"Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother's reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose."
"Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while."
"While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate, Mankind inanimate phantasy."
"How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?"
"I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window."
"I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye, For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by."
"I would that there was nothing in the world But my beloved that night and day had perished, And all that is and all that is to be, All that is not the meeting of our lips."
"I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined."
"We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh."
"To sit beside the board and drink good wine And watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire And feel content and wisdom in your heart, This is the best of life; when we are young We long to tread a way none trod before, But find the excellent old way through love And through the care of children to the hour Forbidding Fate and Time and Change goodbye."
"Death and life were not Till man made up the whole, Made lock, stock and barrel Out of his bitter soul"