Seamus Heaney Quotes

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin.

Walk on air against your better judgement.

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

The end of art is peace.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

Poetry is language in orbit.

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

I drink to keep body and soul apart.

The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.

Not to Learn Irish is to miss the opportunity of understanding what life in this country has meant and could mean in a better future. It is to cut oneself off from ways of being at home. If we regard self-understanding, mutual understanding, imaginative enhancement, cultural diversity and a tolerant political atmosphereas a desirable attainments, we should remember that a knowledge of the Irish language is an essential element in their realisation.

Getting started, keeping going, getting started again - in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives, credibility to yourselves as well as to others.

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

Im a firm believer in learning by heart.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.