In dreams begins responsibility.
All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
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.
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood; And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes...
Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?
We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love.
Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
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.
BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there;.
I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me.
Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.