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.

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

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

Words alone are certain good.