R.E. Butler Quotes

... What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.

I had a chair at every hearth, When no one turned to see, With 'Look at that old fellow there, 'And who may he be?

In dreams begin responsibilitiy.

We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.

There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.

The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars!

Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.

For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.

It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.

An intellectual hate is the worst.

Hammer your thoughts into unity.

I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.

His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.

The winds that awakened the stars Are blowing through my blood.

Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

There is no deformity But saves us from a dream.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

Cuchulain stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried; And fought with the invulnerable tide.

Now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.

My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.

Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

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

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?"

A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.

Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.

Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.

Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...

yet it seems Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, But the torn petals strew the garden plot; And there's but common greenness after that.

Even the wisest man grows tense With some sort of violence Before he can accomplish fate, Know his work or choose his mate. Poet and sculptor, do the work, Nor let the modish painter shirk

All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?

I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.

And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.