Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (as "addled mosses dank"), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing-nothing that you couldn't, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

There is no topicmore soporific and generally boring than the topic of Ireland as Ireland, as a nation.

A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at.

The eyes of this dead lady speak to me For here was love, was not to be drowned out. And here desire, not to be kissed away. The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.