“Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.”

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.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.

I will be feeling morbid and joyful at the same time.

There is a joy in danger.

Now I am in my eighties, and I have known the joys and sorrows of a full life. Age, however, has its privileges. One is to reminisce, and another is to reminisce selectively.

If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.

when you came you cried and everybody smiled with joy; when you go smile and let the world cry for you.