Virtue is the performance of pleasant actions.

In my opinion, they were good men— men that is, who willed no evil. No person living is the worse off for having known Thomas MacDonagh.

If I asked her master he'd give me a cask a day; / But she with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange! / May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten and may / The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.

The wind stood up and gave a shout. / He whistled on his fingers and / Kicked the withered leaves about / And thumped the branches with his hand / And said that he'd kill and kill, / And so he will and so he will.

And there the goats, day after day, / Stray in sunny quietness, / Cropping here and cropping there, / As they pause and turn and pass, / Now a bit of heather spray, / Now a mouthful of the grass.

We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered, we get wise, for a well-packed question carries its answer on its back as a snail carries its shell.

The toxin generates the anti-toxin. The end lies concealed in the beginning. All bodies grow around a skeleton. Life is a petticoat about death.

Even the wind had ceased, and there seemed to be nothing in the world but the darkness and himself. In that gigantic blackness, in that unseen quietude and vacancy, the mind could cease to be personal to itself. It could be overwhelmed and merged in space, so that consciousness would be transferred or dissipated, and one might sleep standing; for the mind fears loneliness more than all else, and will escape to the moon rather than be driven inwards on its own being.

The chief business of the gods is to give protection and assistance to such of their people as require it; but... they cannot give any help until it is demanded, the free-will of mankind being the most jealously guarded and holy principle in life; therefore, the interference of the loving gods comes only on an equally loving summons.

It is by love alone that we understand anything.