True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Love
From our birthday, until we die, is but the winking of an eye.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Birthdays
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Imagination
Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Planning, Preparation
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Censorship
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Dance
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
Topics: Perfection
Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.
—William Butler Yeats
The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Motivation
Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.
—William Butler Yeats
Topics: Happiness, Growth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
George Bernard Shaw Irish Playwright
George William Russell Irish Author
Oscar Wilde Irish Poet, Playwright
Brendan Behan Irish Poet
Oliver Goldsmith Anglo-Irish Novelist, Poet
Jonathan Swift Irish Satirist
James Joyce Irish Novelist
W. H. Auden British-born American Poet
T. S. Eliot American-born British Poet
Edmund Burke British Philosopher, Statesman