George William Russell Quotes

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“Our true hearts are forever lonely:
A wistfulness is in our thought:
Our lights are like the dawns which only
Seem bright to us and yet are not.”

“In day from some titanic past it seems
As if a thread divine of memory runs;
Born ere the Mighty One began his dreams,
Or yet were stars and suns.”

“If the Gods would only inspire me a little more vigorously I would write no end, but as it is I have to sweat over my work, such as it is, and often groan that I never have a chance to do it properly.”

“Ah, sigh for us whose hearts unseeing
Point all their passionate love in vain,
And blinded in the joy of being,
Meet only when pain touches pain.”

“I am the sunlight in the heart, the silver moonglow in the mind;
My laughter runs and ripples through the wavy tresses of the wind.
I am the fire upon the hills, the dancing flame that leads afar
Each burning-hearted wanderer, and I the dear and homeward star.”

“We are desert leagues apart;
Time is misty ages now
Since the warmth of heart to heart
Chased the shadows from my brow.”

“We are tired who follow after
Phantasy and truth that flies:
You with only look and laughter
Stain our hearts with richest dyes.”

“We loved in infinite spaces, forgetting here
The breasts that were lit with life and the lips so near;
Till the wizard willows waved in the wind and drew
Me away from the fulness of love and down to you.”

“Who would think this quiet breather
From the world had taken flight?
Yet within the form we see there
Wakes the golden King to-night.”

“I pitied one whose tattered dress
Was patched, and stained with dust and rain;
He smiled on me; I could not guess
The viewless spirit's wide domain.”

“Age is no more near than youth
To the sceptre and the crown.
Vain the wisdom, vain the truth;
Do not lay thy rapture down.”

“After the spiritual powers, there is no thing in the world more unconquerable than the spirit of nationality. … The spirit of nationality in Ireland will persist even though the mightiest of material powers be its neighbor.”

“Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity. If you had between you collectively a portion of human soul as large as a threepenny bit, you would have sat night and day with the representatives of labour, trying this or that solution of the trouble, mindful of the women and children, who at least were innocent of wrong against you. But no! You reminded labour you could always have your three square meals a day while it went hungry.”

“I needed love no words could say;
She drew me softly nigh her chair,
My head upon her knees to lay,
With cool hands that caressed my hair.
She sat with hands as if to bless,
And looked with grave, ethereal eyes;
Ensouled by ancient quietness,
A gentle priestess of the Wise.”

“Twilight, a timid fawn, went glimmering by,
And night, the dark blue hunter, followed fast:
Ceaseless pursuit and flight were in the sky,
But the long chase had ceased for us at last.”

“A shaft of fire that falls like dew,
And melts and maddens all my blood,
From out thy spirit flashes through
The burning glass of womanhood.”

“And sun and moon and starry fires and earth and air and sea
Are creatures from the deep let loose who pause in ecstasy,
Or wing their wild and heavenly way until again they find
The ancient deep and fade therein, enraptured, bright and blind.”

“He said, 'The royal robe I wear
Trails all along the fields of light:
Its silent blue and silver bear
For gems the starry dust of night.'
'The breath of joy unceasingly
Waves to and fro its folds starlit,
And far beyond earth's misery
I live and breathe the joy of it.”

“I have met other women who were tender,
As you were cold, dear! with a grace as rare.
Think you, I turned to them, or made surrender,
I who had found you fair?”

“A young man who had been troubling society with impalpable doctrines of a new civilization which he called "the Kingdom of Heaven" had been put out of the way; and I can imagine that believer in material power murmuring as he went homeward, "it will all blow over now." Yes. The wind from the Kingdom of Heaven has blown over the world, and shall blow for centuries yet.”

“There was autocracy in political life, and it was superseded by democracy. So surely will democratic power wrest from you the control of industry. The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not now show that you have some humanity still among you. Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body. Be warned ere it is too late.”

“What is the use of speech? Silence were fitter:
Lest we should still be wishing things unsaid.
Though all the words we ever spake were bitter,
Shall I reproach you, dead?”

“We deem our love so infinite
Because the Lord is everywhere,
And love awakening is made bright
And bathed in that diviner air.”

“We go on our enchanted way
And deem our hours immortal hours,
Who are but shadow kings that play
With mirrored majesties and powers.”

“We may fight against what is wrong, but if we allow ourselves to hate, that is to insure our spiritual defeat and our likeness to what we hate.”

“The tower of heaven turns darker blue; a starry sparkle now begins;
The mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and the sins
Come back to me.”

“Here the ancient mystery
Holds its hands out day by day,
Takes a chair and croons with me
By my cabin built of clay.
When the dusky shadow flits,
By the chimney nook I see
Where the old enchanter sits,
Smiles, and waves, and beckons me.”

“Here the wild will woke within her lighting up her flying dreams,
Round and round the planets whirling break in woods and flowers and streams,
And the winds are shaken from them as the leaves from off the rose,
And the feet of earth go dancing in the way that beauty goes,
And the souls of earth are kindled by the incense of her breath
As her light alternate lures them through the gates of birth and death.”

“Though the dream of love may tire,
In the ages long agone
There were ruby hearts of fire —
Ah, the daughters of the dawn!”

“There were ruby dews were shed when the heart was riven,
And passionate pleading and prayers to the dead we had wronged;
And we passed away unremembering and unforgiven,
Hastening away to the King for the peace we longed.”

“Who is that goddess to whom men should pray
But her from whom their hearts have turned away,
Out of whose virgin being they were born,
Whose mother nature they have named in scorn
Calling its holy substance common clay.
Yet from this so despised earth was made
The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed
Their generations with a light caress,
And from some image of whose loveliness
The heart built up high heaven when it prayed.”

“Image of beauty, when I gaze on thee,
Trembling I waken to a mystery,
How through one door we go to life or death
By spirit kindled or the sensual breath.”

“I sometimes think a mighty lover
Takes every burning kiss we give:
His lights are those which round us hover:
For him alone our lives we live.”

“As to her worshippers she came descending from her glowing skies
So Aphrodite I have seen with shining eyes look through your eyes:
One gleam of the ancestral face which lighted up the dawn for me:
One fiery visitation of the love the gods desire in thee!”

“Here in these shades the Ancient knows itself, the Soul,
And out of slumber waking starts unto the goal.”

“Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid:
The wave of phantom time withdraws; and that young Babylonian maid,
One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide,
Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side.
Oh, light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.”

“All the morn a spirit gay
Breathes within my heart a rhyme,
'Tis but hide and seek we play
In and out the courts of Time.”

“Search for the high austere and lonely way
The Spirit moves in through eternities.
Ah, in the soul what memories arise!
And with what yearning inexpressible,
Rising from long forgetfulness I turn
To Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still:
White for Thy whiteness all desires burn.
Ah, with what longing once again I turn!”

“The power is ours to make or mar
Our fate as on the earliest morn,
The Darkness and the Radiance are
Creatures within the spirit born.
Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
Forget how we imagined light.
Not yet are fixed the prison bars:
The hidden light the spirit owns
If blown to flame would dim the stars
And they who rule them from their thrones:
And the proud sceptred spirits thence
Would bow to pay us reverence.”

“Heart-hidden from the outer things I rose;
The spirit woke anew in nightly birth
Unto the vastness where forever glows
The star-soul of the earth.
There all alone in primal ecstasy,
Within her depths where revels never tire,
The Olden Beauty shines: each thought of me
Is veined through with its fire.”

“Let thy young wanderer dream on:
Call him not home.
A door opens, a breath a voice
From the ancient room,
Speaks to him now. Be it dark or bright
He is knit with his doom.”

“Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose,
Withers once more the old blue flower of day:
There where the ether like a diamond glows
Its petals fade away.”

“Each dream remembered is a burning-glass,
Where through to darkness from the Light of Lights
Its rays in splendour pass.”

“Canst thou not see adown the silver cloudland streaming
Rivers of faery light, dewdrop on dewdrop falling,
Starfire of silver flames, lighting the dark beneath?
And what enraptured hosts burn on the dusky heath!
Come thou away with them, for Heaven to Earth is calling.”

“The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of you. No doubt, you have rights on your side. No doubt, some of you suffered without just cause. But nothing which has been done to you cries aloud to Heaven for condemnation as your own actions.”

“This mood hath known all beauty for it sees
O'erwhelmed majesties
In these pale forms, and kingly crowns of gold
On brows no longer bold,
And through the shadowy terrors of their hell
The love for which they fell,
And how desire which cast them in the deep
Called God too from his sleep.”

“Our love was so vast that it filled the heavens up:
But the soft white form I held was an empty cup,
When the willows called me back to earth with their sigh,
And we moved as shades through the deep that was you and I.”

“The life which passes mourns its wasted hour.
And, ah, to think how thin the veil that lies
Between the pain of hell and paradise!”

“He felt an inner secret joy!
A spirit of unfettered will
Through light and darkness moving still
Within the All to find its own,
To be immortal and alone.”