“Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.”

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.

Hearts are not had as a gift, But hearts are earned.

France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.

The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world.

Meet everybody and every circumstance on the battlefield of life with the courage of a hero and the smile of a conqueror.

Untrained warriors are soon killed on the battlefield; so also persons untrained in the art of preserving their inner peace are quickly riddled by the bullets of worry and restlessness in active life.

There’s a battle going on inside you in Ramadan, and for 30 days Allah gives you the power to win.

The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle – and not lose it.

Determination can be a battle or a thrill. Choose to be thrilled.

Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.