Quotes to inspire and reflect

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln.

Degenerate sons and daughters, Life is too strong for you— It takes life to love life.

Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music.

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life!

A great nose indicates a great man— Genial, courteous, intellectual, Virile, courageous.

All, all, are sleeping on the hill.

Bird sighs for the air, Thought for I know not where, For the womb the seed sighs. Now sinks the same rest On mind, on nest, On straining thighs.

Every true history is contemporary history. 1

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut:

Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made.

I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

Fifteen apparitions have I seen; The worst a coat upon a coat-hanger.

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream His mind moves upon silence.

What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.

Down the mountain walls From where Pan’s cavern is Intolerable music falls. Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear, Belly, shoulder, bum, Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs Copulate in the foam.

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?

John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

An old man’s eagle mind.

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

My temptation is quiet. Here at life’s end Neither loose imagination, Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

Grant me an old man’s frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

If soul may look and body touch, Which is the more blest?

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages, And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages, It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear.

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

I pray—for fashion’s word is out And prayer comes round again— That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrowbone.

I gave what other women gave That stepped out of their clothes, But when this soul, its body off, Naked to naked goes, He it has found shall find therein What none other knows.

Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead… That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant.

I carry the sun in a golden cup, The moon in a silver bag. 8

But Love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.

What were all the world’s alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen’s arms?

I had wild Jack for a lover.

“Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,” I cried. “My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied.”

Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.

Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

No man has ever lived that had enough Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.

Things said or done long years ago, Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.

That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit.

The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song After great cathedral gong.

The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.