β
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois
β
I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (Selected Poems and Four Plays)
β
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Believe in life! Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller life.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois
β
The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois
β
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him up for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
What can be explained is not poetry.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
(Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven)
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Wind Among the Reeds)
β
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age)
β
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
WINE comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and sigh.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
When You Are Old"
WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois
β
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, β all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, β who is good? not that men are ignorant, β what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
β
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those who are not entirely beautiful.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois (Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept)
β
THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.
β
β
B.W. Powe (Towards a Canada of Light)
β
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois
β
Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnightβs all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnetβs wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heartβs core.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
- The Song of Wandering Aengus
β
β
W.B. Yeats (A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.
β
β
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century)
β
Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentlema. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschole with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs VErschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
β
β
James Joyce (Ulysses)
β
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs.
B is for Basil assaulted by bears.
C is for Clara who wasted away.
D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh.
E is for Ernest who choked on a peach.
F is for Fanny sucked dry by a leech.
G is for George smothered under a rug.
H is for Hector done in by a thug.
I is for Ida who drowned in a lake.
J is for James who took lye by mistake.
K is for Kate who was struck with an axe.
L is for Leo who choked on some tacks.
M is for Maud who was swept out to sea.
N is for Neville who died of ennui.
O is for Olive run through with an awl.
P is for Prue trampled flat in a brawl.
Q is for Quentin who sank on a mire.
R is for Rhoda consumed by a fire.
S is for Susan who perished of fits.
T is for Titus who flew into bits.
U is for Una who slipped down a drain.
V is for Victor squashed under a train.
W is for Winnie embedded in ice.
X is for Xerxes devoured by mice.
Y is for Yorick whose head was bashed in.
Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin.
β
β
Edward Gorey