Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"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."

"Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."

"Hut of clay and Loz in the middle of the island state."

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

"Hope that you may understand!"

"Hope is less dear than the dew of the morn."

"How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fix on Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows what he talks about, and there's a politician that has read and thought, and maybe what they say is true of war and war's alarms, but O that I were young again and held her in my arms!"

"How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?"

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

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

"I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever seen, and that these are not far away... the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them."

"I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death."

"I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age."

"I bring you with reverent hands."

"I call on those that call me son, grandson, or great-grandson, on uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, to judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, spoilt what old loins have sent?"

"I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart."

"I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought; measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse so great a sweetness flows into the breast we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest."

"I am still of [the] opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead."

"I am content to live it all again and yet again, if it be life to pitch into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, a blind man battering blind men; or into that most fecund ditch of all, the folly that man does or must suffer, if he woos a proud woman not kindred of his soul."

"I call to the mysterious one who yet shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge, and look most like me, being indeed my double, and prove of all imaginable things the most unlike, being my anti-self, and, standing by these characters, disclose all that I seek; and whisper it as though he were afraid the birds, who cry aloud their momentary cries before it is dawn, would carry it away to blasphemous men."

"I carry the sun in a golden cup, the moon in a silver bag."

"I could have warned you, but you are young."

"I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen."

"I could recover if I shrieked."

"I gave what other women gave that stepped out of their clothes, but when this soul, its body off, naked to naked goes, he it has found shall find therein what none other knows, and give his own and take his own and rule in his own right; and though it loved in misery close and cling so tight, there?s not a bird of day that dare extinguish that delight."

"I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, as I soon discovered, for my mind is abnormally restless; and I was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is merely imagining. I therefore invented a new process. I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves."

"I had a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one's verses should hold, as in a mirror, the colors of one's own climate and scenery in their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of setting things right, not as I should now by making my rhythms faint and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board."

"I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree."

"I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods does he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips."

"I had a thought for no one's but your ears: that you were beautiful, and that I strove to love you in the old high way of love; that it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown as weary-hearted as that hollow moon."

"I had this thought a while ago."

"I had thought for no one's but your ears; that you were beautiful and that I strove to love you in the old high way of love; that it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown as weary hearted as that hollow moon."

"I had thought, seeing how bitter is that wind that shakes the shutter, to have brought to mind all those that manhood tried, or childhood loved or boyish intellect approved,"

"I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher."

"I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, ? that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up their individuality.... The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth."

"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."

"I have found nothing half so good as my long-planned half solitude, where I can sit up half the night with some friend that has the wit not to allow his looks to tell when I am unintelligible."

"I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots."

"I have long waited, mother, for that word."

"I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods make their faint thunder, and the garden bees hum in the lime-tree flowers; and put away the unavailing outcries and the old bitterness that empty the heart. I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness upon the throne and crying about the streets and hanging its paper flowers from post to post, because it is alone of all things happy. I am contented, for I know that Quiet Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer, Who but awaits His house to shoot, still hands a cloudy quiver over Pairc-na-lee."

"I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know."

"I have often heard the sweet sound of his bow."

"I have met them at close of day coming with vivid faces from counter or desk among grey eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head or polite meaningless words, or have lingered awhile and said polite meaningless words."

"I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang."

"I have often had the fancy that there is someone Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought."

"I have often heard him singing to and fro."

"I heard an old religious man."

"I have spread my dreams beneath your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

"I hear lake water lapping with low sound by the shore. ... I hear it in the deep heart's core."