Delphi, Greece - 20071. "All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things."
2. "All life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens."
3. ”All the words that I gather,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm darkened or starry bright.”
4. "Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep."
5. “A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.”
6. “But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”
7. “Come away, O human child!
to the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand,
for the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand...”
8. “Come Fairies,
take me out of this dull world,
for I would ride with you upon the wind
and dance upon the mountains like a flame!”
9. “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”
10. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
11. “Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams...“
12. “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.”
13. “Hearts are not to be had as a gift
Hearts are to be earned...”
14. "How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
15. "I always knew that the lion of Nature is crooked, that, though we dig the canal-beds as straight as we can, the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness."
16. “I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.”
17. "If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask."
18. “I have believed the best of every man,
And find that to believe it is enough
To make a bad man show him at his best,
Or even a good man swing his lantern higher.”
19. ”I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
20. "I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memorized self, that shapes the elaborate shell the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis thaat joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind."
21. “In dreams begins responsibility.”
22. “In wise love each defines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an image to copy in daily life; for love also creates the Mask.”
23. "Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?"
24. “It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.”
25. "It seems to me that love, if fine, is essentially a discipline."
26. “I would mould a world of fire and dew.”
27. “Life moves out of a red flare of dreams into a common light of common hours, until old age bring the red flare again.”
28. ”Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.”
29. “Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality."
30. "Love is created and preserved by intellectual analysis, for we love only that which is unique, and it belongs to contemplation, not to action, for we would not change that which we love."
31. “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”
32. "My life has been in my poems.... I have seen others enjoying, while I stand alone with myself -commenting, commenting- a mere dead mirror on which things reflect themselves."
33. “Mysticism has been in the past & probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world & it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.”
34. “One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain.
Because the mountain grass
Cannot keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.”
35. "One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end."
36. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”
37. ”O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.”
38. “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.”
39. ”People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.”
40. “Personality is born out of pain. It is the fire shut up in the flint.”
41. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
42. “The borders of our minds are ever shifting and many minds can flow into one another and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.”
43. “The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.”
44. “The friends that have I do it wrong / Whenever I remake a song, / Should know what issue is at stake: / It is myself that I remake.”
45. "The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time."
46. “The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.”
47. "Their hearts are wild, As the hearts of birds, till children come."
48. “The land of fairy,
where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.”
“The poet is a good citizen turned inside out.”
49. "They were such good friends they had never fallen in love with each other. Perfect love and perfect friendship are indeed incompatible, for the one is a battlefield where shadows war beside the combatants, and the other a placid country where Consultation has her dwelling."
50. “Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.”
51. "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world … The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."
52. “Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.”
53. “Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.”
54. “Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love.”
55. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.”
56. "We begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy."
57. “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
58. ”We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by he knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one in art and less in life, had a continual preoccupation with religion. Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word -- ecstacy. An old artist wrote to me* of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic story. "I wanted to paint her," he wrote, "if I denied myself any of the pain I could not believe in my own ecstasy." We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforseen wing-footed wanderer.”
59. “When you are old and gray 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.”
60. “Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.”
61. "While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love."
62. ”Who can tell the dancer from the dance?”
63. "Who mocks at music mocks at love."
64. "Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh."
65. “Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”
66. "You shall go with me, newly-married bride,
And gaze upon a merrier multitude.
White-armed Nuala, Aengus of the Birds,
Feachra of the hurtling form, and him
Who is the ruler of the Western Host,
Finvara, and their Land of Heart's Desire.
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song."
