The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.

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.