Top 90 Seamus Heaney Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Seamus Heaney

2. “If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.”

— Seamus Heaney

3. “Walk on air against your better judgement.”

— Seamus Heaney

4. “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.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

6. “So hope for a great sea-change On the far side of revenge. Believe that further shore Is reachable from here. Believe in miracles And cures and healing wells.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

8. “Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

10. “All I know is a door into the dark.”

— Seamus Heaney

11. “The next move is always the test.”

— Seamus Heaney

12. “Poetry is language in orbit.”

— Seamus Heaney

13. “Behaviour that’s admired is the path to power among people everywhere.”

— Seamus Heaney

14. “Wherever that man went, he went gratefully.”

— Seamus Heaney

15. “How perilous is it to choose not to love the life we’re shown?”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

17. “If self is a location, so is love.”

— Seamus Heaney

18. “Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.”

— Seamus Heaney

19. “The end of art is peace.”

— Seamus Heaney

20. “Write whatever you like!”

— Seamus Heaney

21. “You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

23. “I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one’s own sense of oneself.”

— Seamus Heaney

24. “The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful.”

— Seamus Heaney

25. “I shall gain glory or die.”

— Seamus Heaney

26. “Fate goes ever as fate must.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

28. “It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

30. “The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.”

— Seamus Heaney

31. “The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.”

— Seamus Heaney

32. “I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”

— Seamus Heaney

33. “You carried your own burden and very soon your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.”

— Seamus Heaney

34. “The dotted line my father’s ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won’t wash away.”

— Seamus Heaney

35. “Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport’s green.”

— Seamus Heaney

36. “I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people’s necks.”

— Seamus Heaney

37. “If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now and then, a stance.”

— Seamus Heaney

38. “Smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt.”

— Seamus Heaney

39. “The ‘voice of sanity’ is getting hoarse.”

— Seamus Heaney

40. “Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive.”

— Seamus Heaney

41. “Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

43. “A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can’t be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.”

— Seamus Heaney

44. “The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.”

— Seamus Heaney

45. “I drink to keep body and soul apart.”

— Seamus Heaney

46. “Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.”

— Seamus Heaney

47. “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.”

— Seamus Heaney

48. “It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.”

— Seamus Heaney

49. “Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.”

— Seamus Heaney

50. “My body was braille for the creeping influences.”

— Seamus Heaney