Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.

All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.