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Quotes
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- Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. O. When may it suffice?
- The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
- 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 balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.
- I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
- Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.
- The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
- The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God the herdsman treads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
- But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.
- The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
- Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
- A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
- I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
- I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.
- Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
- Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
- In dreams begin responsibility.
- Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
- Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.
- A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.
- When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
- An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
- Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
- Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
- I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
- I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
- And say my glory was I had such friends.
- Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
- Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.
- Education is not the filling of the pail, but, the lighting of the fire.
- To be born woman is to know -- although they do not speak of it at school -- women must labor to be beautiful.
- We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
- I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
- It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
- The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
- There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.
- "Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire."
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William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower and The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and Bollingen Prize laureate Ezra Pound. Yeats wrote the introduction for Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, which was published by the India Society.
He was born in Dublin and educated there and in London; he spent his childhood holidays in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats's debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
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