William Butler Yeats Quotes

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that Labour disagrees with me in that. On this matter I am a crusted Tory. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says "there is no wisdom without leisure."

I agree about Shaw — he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.

One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.

Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas.

In dreams begins responsibility.

The friends that have it I do wrong
Whenever I remake a song
Should know what issue is at stake,
It is myself that I remake.

The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.

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. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up their individuality.... The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

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 — the colleges I mean — like an opera.

This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.