Quotes from William Butler Yeats

The living can assist the imagination of the dead.

Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

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.

There is only one romance the Soul's.

My wretched dragon is perplexed.

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.

I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

But bear in mind your lover's wage Is what your looking-glass can show, And that he will turn green with rage At all that is not pictured there.

The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

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.

This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.

There is another world, but it is in this one.

But was there ever dog that praised his fleas?

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away.

It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?