I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
- William Butler Yeats
I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.
- William Butler Yeats
All empty sould tend toward extreme opinions.
- William Butler Yeats
Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
- William Butler Yeats
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.
- William Butler Yeats
In dreams begins responsibility.
- William Butler Yeats
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
- William Butler Yeats
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
- William Butler Yeats
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.
- William Butler Yeats
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
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.
- William Butler Yeats
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
- William Butler Yeats
Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends.
- William Butler Yeats
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
- William Butler Yeats
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
- William Butler Yeats
Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye, That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.
- William Butler Yeats
All empty sould tend toward extreme opinions.
- William Butler Yeats
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.
- William Butler Yeats
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric, of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
- William Butler Yeats
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.
- William Butler Yeats
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.
- William Butler Yeats
Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our quarrels with ourselves we make poetry.
- William Butler Yeats
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."
- William Butler Yeats
The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.
- William Butler Yeats
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.
- William Butler Yeats
