1,059 Quotes by William Butler Yeats

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,And open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window....

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?

I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.

THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea

People are responsible for their opinions, but Providence is responsible for their morals.

Of conflicts with others we make retorica, of conflicts with ourselves poetry