"Sooth't were a pleasant life to lead, With nothing in the world to do But just to blow a shepherd's reed, The silent season thro' And just to drive a flock to feed,— Sheep—quiet, fond and few!"

"Give me to live with Love alone And let the world go dine and dress; For Love hath lowly haunts... If life's a flower, I choose my own— 'T is "love in Idleness"."

"When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth."

"No longer would we imprison thee though thou art all gentleness and would chat and jest with us by the hour."

"There is an instinct that leads a listener to be very sparing of credence when a fact is communicated; it doesn't ring well in his ears—it has too much or too little gloss; he receives it with a shrug, and passes it on with a huge notch in it to show how justly it is entitled to suspicion; he is not to be imposed upon by a piece of truth. But give him a fable fresh from the mint of the Mendacity Society—an on dit of the first water—and he will not only make affidavit of its truth, but will call any man out who ventures to dispute its authenticity."

"Space is a wind that does not blow On Betelgeuse and time – oh time – is a bird, Whose wings have never stirred The golden avenues of leaves On Betelgeuse."

"You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist.But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to."

"The children play At hide and seek About the monument To Speke. And why should the dead Explorer mind Who has nothing to seek And nothing to find?"

"The sun has burst the sky Because I love you And the river its banks."

"A sheep in sheep's clothing."

"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me. And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter."

"I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing."

"For milkmaids and queens and gipsy-princesses Dream and kiss blindfold or starve upon guesses."

"Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear (The gentler dolphins of kindlier waves) With sensitive heads alert of ear; Frail crowds that a delicate hearing saves."

"Break free, my soul, good manners are thy tomb!"

"Shells with lip, or tooth, or bleeding gum, Tell-tale shells, and shells that whisper 'Come', Shells that stammer, blush, and yet are dumb – " "O let me hear!"

"In my opinion Mr. Moore is a greater poet than Mr. Yeats. He has lived obscurely, and has not displayed Mr. Yeats's talent for self-dramatization; for these reasons and others he has never become a public figure or a popular writer."

"What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen."

"The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation."

"He had the satisfied countenance of a man who has never succeeded in boring himself."

"London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London."

"The smell of the library was always the same – the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as "the steam of the social soup"."

"One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines."

"No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there."

"Only those with great ambitions know what great fears drive them forward."

"I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned."

"Whoso maintains that I am humbled now (Who wait the Awful Day) is still a liar; I hope to meet my Maker brow to brow And find my own the higher."

"O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, Missing so much and so much? O fat white woman whom nobody loves, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves, When the grass is soft as the breast of doves And shivering-sweet to the touch? O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, Missing so much and so much?"

"Her appearance was indeed remarkable — strange almost beyond the reach of adjectives … She resembled a puissant blend of both sexes — Lady Chatterley and her lover rolled into one."

"I have been reading Grey Wethers—a magnificent book. The descriptions of the downs are as fine as any in the language. Such power! Such power! Not a pleasant book of course! But what English!"

"Instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other."

"Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell (and that recalls another Mary) suppose, I say, that Sibyl next October says "There's Virginia gone and written a book about Vita" … Shall you mind?"

"While many a lovely ship below sailed by On unknown errand, kempt and leisurely; And after each, oh, after each, my heart Fled forth, as, watching from the Downs apart, I shared with ships good joys and fortunes wide That might befall their beauty and their pride…"

"Often on the painted stair, As I passed abstractedly, Velvet footsteps, two and three, Padded gravely after me. — There was nothing, nothing there, Nothing there to see."

"A young Apollo, golden-haired, Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, Magnificently unprepared For the long littleness of life."

"The young men strained upon the crank To wring the last reluctant inch. They laughed together, fair and frank, And threw their loins across the winch."

"I saw within the wheelwright’s shed The big round cartwheels, blue and red; A plough with blunted share; A blue tin jug; a broken chair; And paint in trial patchwork square Slapping up against the wall; The lumber of the wheelwright’s trade, And tools on benches neatly laid, The brace, the adze, the awl;"

"The greater cats with golden eyes Stare out between the bars. Deserts are there, and the different skies, And night with different stars. They prowl the aromatic hill, And mate as fiercely as they kill, To roam, to live, to drink their fill; But this beyond their wit know I: Man loves a little, and for long shall die."

"Their strength's eternal in their sight, They overtake the deer in flight, And in their arrogance they smite; But I am sage, if they are strong: Man's love is transient as his death is long."

"All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held Reality down fluttering to a bench."

"The country habit has me by the heart, For he's bewitched for ever who has seen, Not with his eyes but with his vision, Spring Flow down the woods and stipple leaves with sun, As each man knows the life that fits him best, The shape it makes in his soul, the tune, the tone, And after ranging on a tentative flight Stoops like the merlin to the constant lure."

"Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn The boundaried love of country, being free Of winds, and alien lands, and distances, Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers, Pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost Their privilege, and in the peddler's pack The curious treasures of their stock-in-trade, Bossy and singular, the heritage Of poetry and science, polished bright, Thin with the rubbing of too many hands; Myth, glamour, hazard, fables dim as age, Faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair, Wings, and great waters, and Promethean fire, Man's hand to clasp, and Helen's mouth to kiss. Why then in little meadows hedge about A poet's pasture? shed a poet's cloak For fustian? cede a birthright, thus to map So small a corner of so great a world?"

"Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep."

"In February, if the days be clear, The waking bee, still drowsy on the wing, Will sense the opening of another year And blunder out to seek another spring."

"I came from nowhere, and shall be Strong, steadfast, swift, eternally: I am a lion, a stone, a tree, And as the Polar star in me Is fixed my constant heart on thee. Ah, may I stay forever blind With lions, tigers, leopards, and their kind."

"Leopards on the gable-ends, Leopards on the painted stair, Stiff the blazoned shield they bear, Or and gules, a bend of vair, Leopards on the gable-ends, Leopards everywhere."

"Darling, I thought of nothing mean; I thought of killing straight and clean. You're safe; that's gone, that wild caprice, But tell me once before I cease, Which does your Church esteem the kinder role, To kill the body or destroy the soul?"

"You took me weak and unprepared. I had not thought that you who shared My days, my nights, my heart, my life, Would slash me with a naked knife And gently tell me not to bleed But to accept your crazy creed."

"Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens, When I have no engagements written on my block, When no one comes to disturb my inward peace, When no one comes to take me away from myself And turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle, A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection, Being so contrived that it takes too long a time To get myself back to myself when they have gone."

"And what have I to give my friends in the last resort? An awkwardness, a shyness, and a scrap, No thing that's truly me, a bootless waste, A waste of myself and them, for my life is mine And theirs presumably theirs, and cannot touch."