And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?
There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk.
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.
I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction.
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.
Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.
Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.
I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.
No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.
