Top 90 Seamus Heaney Quotes (2024 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. “Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

21. “The end of art is peace.”

— Seamus Heaney

22. “Write whatever you like!”

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

— Seamus Heaney

28. “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

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

33. “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

34. “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

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

— Seamus Heaney

36. “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

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

— Seamus Heaney

38. “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

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

41. “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

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

46. “The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.”

— Seamus Heaney

47. “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

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

— Seamus Heaney

49. “I’ve always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.”

— Seamus Heaney

50. “In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.”

— Seamus Heaney