I. His Ruling Ideas from The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“if a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart’s desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “The desire seems not other than the desire of the bird for its mate in the heart of the wood, and we listen to that joyous praise as though a bird watching its plumage in still water had begun to sing in its joy, or as if we heard hawk praising hawk in the middle air, and because it is the praise of one made for all noble life and not for pleasure only, it seems, though it is the praise of the body, that it is the noblest praise.”
  2. “‘evil’ for the Buddhist is that which brings suffering in its train; and how the world we live in, and the destiny we bear,-its meed of pleasure and of pain,-is made in the greater part of the mental Doing we inherit; just as the world a man inhabits in his dreaming is component in the main of the thoughts and actions of his daily life.”
  3. “Self-seeking for the brute,-for Man the Sacrifice of Self; the world’s thrones for the weak and foolish,-Self-empire for the Strong and Wise; Hatred grown into Love, and all the darkness of Ignorance illumined by the Light of Lights, which is the Law of Uttermost Compassion:-thus shall it be on earth when the Great Law shall have at last worked out the Destiny of Man
  4. “it is its teaching of the Law of Righteousness, its exposition of the mechanism of moral retribution, that entitles it to serious consideration; by this alone it can be rightly judged, its message gathered and its purpose seen”
  5. “We know so little of man and of the world that we cannot be certain that the same invisible hands, that gave him an imagination preoccupied with good fortune, gave him also health and wealth, and the power to create beautiful things without labour, that he might honour the Green Tree.”