Land of Heart's Desire, Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood, But joy is wisdom, time an endless song. - William Butler Yeats

One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.

I am still of [the] opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood — sex and the dead.