William Butler Yeats

Talk to me of originality and, I will turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is best packing.

I have come to feel towards it [The Land of Heart's Desire] as O'Grady feels towards it sometimes & even a little as some of my stupidest critics feel. As so often happens with a thing one has been tempted b and is still a little tempted by I am roused by it to a kind of frenzied hatred which is quite out of my control [...].

No man who deserts his own literature for another's can hope for the highest rank. The cradles of the greatest writers are rocked among the scenes they are to celebrate. Wherever an Irish writer has strayed away from Irish themes and Irish feelings, in almost all cases he has done no more than make alms for oblivion. There is no great literature without nationality, and no great nationality without literature.

Perpetual virginity is the tragedy of the soul.

I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.

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.

Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.

Was it needless death after all? / For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said. / We know their dream: enough / To know they dreamed and are dead.

I shall write for my own people, whether in love or hate of them matters little, probably I shall not know which it is.

Civilisation is hooped together, brought. Under a rule, under the semblance of peace. By manifold illusion, but Man's life is thought, And he, despite his terror, cannot cease, Ravening through century after century. Ravening, raging and uprooting, that he may come. Into the desolation of reality.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction; while the worst. Are full of passionate intensity.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is hard enough.

The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.

The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.

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

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work.

The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.

The best people are but a shadow.