Quotes from William Butler Yeats

Man has created death.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.

Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

Education is not about filling a pail, it's about lighting a fire.

Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.

No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.

Overcome the Empyrean; hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places, That in the same calamity Brother and brother, friend and friend, Family and family, City and city may contend.

The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. . . . The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attendance upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.

I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.

To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.

May God be praised for woman That gives up all her mind, A man may find in no man a friendship of her kind.

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

True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.

A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.

Oh, Love is the crooked thing, there is nobody wise enough to find out all that is in it, for he will be thinking about love til the stars run away and the shadows eaten the moon...

A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.