Quotes from 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

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

What can be explained is not poetry.

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.

In dreams begin responsibilities

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find

Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart

Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes.I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.

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.

When you are old and grey 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

And softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

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.

Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is

Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.