Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
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.
How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.
But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
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.
Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood - sex and the dead.
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
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.
A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
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.
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
