William Butler Yeats Quotes

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.

To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart

Wine enters through the mouth,
Love, the eyes.
I raise the glass to my mouth,
I look at you,
I sigh.

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those who are not entirely beautiful.

Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.

When you are old and grey 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

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.

We can only begin to live when we conceive life as
Tragedy.

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield

Myself I must remake.

If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.