Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
World is suddener than we fancy it.
Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.
I am at home in Dublin, more than in any other city.
You can't express emotion without giving information.
All the people I know have been conditioned by snobbery.
Politics: distrust all parties but consider capitalism must go.
I do not envy any animal, though I envy many of their capacities.
A pharaoh's profile, a Krishna's grace, tail like a question mark.
World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.
blind wantons like the gulls who scream And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.
My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts.
Broadcasting is plastic; while it can ape the press, it can also emulate the arts.
I am not yet born; O fill me with strength against those who would freeze my humanity.
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces The guttural sorrow of the refugees.
I am more proud of what distinguishes man from the animals than of what he has in common with them.
All experiment is made on a basis of tradition; all tradition is the crystallization of experiment.
The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold
Down the road someone is practicing scales, The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails
Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with one pulse.
It's no go the merry-go-round, it's no go the rickshaw All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.
I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.
I am 33 years old, and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is, too; maybe our muddles are concurrent.
Before I joined the BBC I was, like most of the intelligentsia, prejudiced not only against that institution but against broadcasting in general.
Why do we like being Irish? Partly because It gives us a hold on the sentimental English As members of a world that never was, Baptized with fairy water
You know the worst: your wills are fickle, Your values blurred, your hearts impure And your past life a ruined church-- But let your poison be your cure.
The rules or 'laws' of poetry are only tentative devices, an approximate scheme. There is no Sinaitic recipe for poetry, for the individual poem is the norm.
And I envy the intransigence of my own Countrymen who shoot to kill and never See the victim's face become their own Or find his motive sabotage their motives.
It is a retrogression when human beings begin to insist on uniform, on one-mindedness, on conditioning their offspring so that all their reactions are automatic.
Man is an unhappy animal and one that can talk. If he was not unhappy, he would have nothing to talk about. But if he had nothing to talk about, he would be unhappy.
World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.
A city built upon mud; A culture built upon profit; Free speech nipped in the bud, The minority always guilty. Why should I want to go back To you, Ireland, my Ireland?
All that I would like to be is human, having a share in a civilized, articulate and well-adjusted community where the mind is given its due but the body is not distrusted
A poet should always be 'collaborating' with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.
Some day I shall write a novel and call it 'A Walking Tour in the Congo' or 'Thrills and Spills in Aeronautics'; but I keep this type of title as a last & mercenary resort.
My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7.
Dublin was hardly worried by the war; her old preoccupations were still preoccupations. The intelligentsia continued their parties; their mutual malice was as effervescent as ever.
Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.
The individualist is an atom thinking about himself (Thank God I am not as other men); the communist, too often, is an atom having ecstasies of self-denial (Thank God I am one in a crowd).
None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives. Are self deceivers, but the worst of all Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy' And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.
I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing
a fortress against ideas and against the Shuddering insidious shock of the theory-vendors The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.
A harrassed and dubious childhood under the hand of a well-meaning but barbarous mother's help from County Armagh led me to think of the North of Ireland as prison and the South as a land of escape.
I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.
All the arts, to varying degrees, involve some kind of a compromise. This being so, how far need the radio dramatist go to meet the public without losing sight of himself and his own standards of value?
In writing 'A Portrait of Athens' I have attempted - rather impressionistically - to give a panorama of its present. But I have also brought in its past because I sincerely think that there is a continuity.
I was the rector's son, born to the anglican order, Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor; The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.
As things may turn out in the future, people may (though I doubt it) find that their work gives them all the enjoyment - physical, intellectual or aesthetic - which they may require. That certainly is not so now.
Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save--as you prefer--the King or Ireland. The land of scholars and saints: Scholars and saints my eye, the land of ambush, Purblind manifestoes, never-ending complaints