What can be explained is not poetry.

That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.

We can only begin to live when we conceive life as Tragedy.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.