The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and greyLike plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day.

It is all as of old, the empty clangour, The scrawled on a five-foot page, The huckster who, mocking holy anger, Painfully paints his face with rage. * * * We that fight till the world is free, We have no comfort in victory; We have read each other as Cain his brother, We know each other, these slaves and we.

For we that fight till the world is free, We are not easy in victory: We have known each other too long, my brother, And fought each other, the world and we.

Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it; Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace; Earth will grow worse till men redeem it, And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.

I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.

For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

Men that are men again: Who goes home? Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home? For there's blood on the grass and blood on the foam, And blood on the body, when Man comes home. And a voice valedictory: Who is for victory? Who is for liberty? Who goes home?

In the city set upon slime and loam,They cry in their Parliament, "Who goes home?"And there comes no answer in arch or dome,For none in the city of graves goes home.Yet these shall perish and understand,For God has pity on this great land.

But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You mustn’t give him beans.

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

Are they clinging to their crosses?

Talk about the pews and steeples  And the cash that goes therewith!But the souls of Christian peoples...            Chuck it, Smith!

The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass.

White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run.

   Nelson turned his blindest eye On Naples and on liberty.

Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal, The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way; Even to-day your royal head may fall — I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay —My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall —I see a little cloud all pink and grey —Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call —I fancy that I heard from Mr. GallThat mushrooms could be cooked another way —I never read the works of Juvenal —I think I will not hang myself to-day.The world will have another washing day;The decadents decay; the pedants pall;And H. G. Wells has found that children play,And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;Rationalists are growing rational —And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,So secret that the very sky seems small —I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The strangest whim has seized me. ... After all I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The gallows in my garden, people say,Is new and neat and adequately tall.

Prince, Prince-Elective on the modern plan, Fulfilling such a lot of People’s Wills, You take the Chiltern Hundreds while you can— A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills.

Prince, Bayard would have smashed his swordTo see the sort of knights you dub — Is that the last of them — O LordWill someone take me to a pub?

They spoke of Progress spiring round, Of Light and Mrs. Humphry Ward — It is not true to say I frowned, Or ran about the room and roared; I might have simply sat and snored — I rose politely in the club And said, “I feel a little bored; Will someone take me to a pub?”

I’ll read "Jack Redskin on the Quest" And feed my brain with better things.

But for the Virtuous Things you do,The Righteous Work, the Public Care,It shall not be forgiven you.

Heaven shall forgive you Bridge at dawn, The clothes you wear — or do not wear — And Ladies’ Leap-frog on the lawn And dyes and drugs, and petits verres.

He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

He did not know the way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

[A]rt is limitation. [...] The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Fairy tales...are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.

Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul; a man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable and important. If he were without humility he would not care; and if he were without pride he would not care.

For there are two types of great humorist: those who love to see a man absurd and those who hate to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabelais and Dickens; of the second kind are Swift and Bernard Shaw.

I must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word God not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment's thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist, "Never believe in a God that you cannot improve on." The atheist (being a sound theologian) naturally replied that one should not believe in a God whom one could improve on; as that would show that he was not God.

We all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see them either in a murder or in a valentine.

The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax.

Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities. In other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in, or with what universe a man lives in, or with how he is to manage to live in either.

"I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God." The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet." They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.

Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.