“We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.”

We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams, Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.

And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon the golden apples of the sun.

I’m looking for the face I had, before the world was made.

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.

Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is, A child’s laughter, a woman’s kiss.

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

Ecstasy is from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen perhaps, by all those that still live.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is.

The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.

God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Though leaves are many, the root is one.

Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.

I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloveable in it, for it is all part of me.

What plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

What is prejudice? An opinion, which is not based upon reason; a judgment, without having heard the argument; a feeling, without being able to trace from whence it came.

As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

I’m not sure what the future holds but I do know that I’m going to be positive and not wake up feeling desperate. As my dad said ‘Nic, it is what it is, it’s not what it should have been, not what it could have been, it is what it is.’

I always feel the movement is a sort of mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.

Without you, dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think – or live – I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night.

I’m my age and I feel glorious.