Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world - W.B. Yeats
Never shall a young man,Thrown into despairBy those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear,Love you for yourself aloneAnd not your yellow hair. - W.B. Yeats
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield - W.B. Yeats
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters. - W.B. Yeats
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is - W.B. Yeats
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. - W.B. Yeats
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. - W.B. Yeats
I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find - W.B. Yeats
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul. - W.B. Yeats
I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. - W.B. Yeats
In dreams begin responsibilities - W.B. Yeats
We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body. - W.B. Yeats
O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast") - W.B. Yeats
The Coming of Wisdom with TimeThough leaves are many, the root is one;Through all the lying days of my youthI swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;Now I may wither into the truth. - W.B. Yeats
An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress - W.B. Yeats
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy. - W.B. Yeats
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core. - W.B. Yeats
What can be explained is not poetry. - W.B. Yeats
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. - W.B. Yeats
Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others. - W.B. Yeats
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. - W.B. Yeats
I carry the Sun in a Golden Cup, the Moon in a Silver Bag. - W.B. Yeats
(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi") - W.B. Yeats
...I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl -- a cousin I think -- having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where she knew [my grandfather] would pass near four o'clock on the way to his dinner, said to him, 'If I were you and you were a little girl, I would give you a doll. - W.B. Yeats
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. - W.B. Yeats
Nor dread nor hope attendA dying animal;A man awaits his endDreading and hoping all. - W.B. Yeats
Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost? - W.B. Yeats
I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns. - W.B. Yeats
THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes. - W.B. Yeats
To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart - W.B. Yeats
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams - W.B. Yeats
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. - W.B. Yeats