“only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.”

All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.

Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.

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.

Seraphs share with thee Knowledge; but Art, O Man, is thine alone!

The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Toil of science swells the wealth of art.

It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I’ve devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.

Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.

Art is the sound of a human dying to be an immortal artist.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.