“I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.”

“When I had laid it on the floorI went to blow the fire a-flame,But something rustled on the floor,And someone called me by my name:It had become a glimmering girlWith apple blossoms in her hairWho called me by my name and ranAnd faded through the brightening air. . . .”

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”

“Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,Enwrought with golden and silver light,The blue and the dim and the dark clothsOf night and light and the half light,I would spread the cloths under your feet:But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”

“Edain came out of Midhir's hill, and layBeside young Aengus in his tower of glass,Where time is drowned in odour-laden windsAnd Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples madeOf opal and ruhy and pale chrysoliteAwake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,Because her hands had been made wild by love.When Midhir's wife had changed her to a fly,He made a harp with Druid apple-woodThat she among her winds might know he wept;And from that hour he has watched over noneBut faithful lovers.”

“Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [The Works of William Blake, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would The Countess Kathleen [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”