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

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.

All that I have said and done, Now that I am old and ill, Turns into a question till I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it’s probably because I’m looking at them in the light of what came later.

And like a passing thought, she fled In light away.

But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!

Must in death your daylight finish? My sun sets to rise again.

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.

I would steal the sun, if that is what it took to bring the light back into your eyes.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.