The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams I have spread my dreams under your feet Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.
I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
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.
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
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.
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
In dreams begins responsibility.
To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.
Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Choose your companions from the best Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.
If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.