We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
~ William Butler Yeats

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In dreams begins responsibility.
~ William Butler Yeats

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It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policemen of language; they are always arresting those old reprobates the words.
~ William Butler Yeats

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I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, and have given up their individuality.
~ William Butler Yeats

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

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Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues. I have certainly 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.
~ William Butler Yeats

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Because the life man sees is not the final end of things, the moment we attain to greatness of any kind by personal labour and will we become fragmentary, and find no task in active life which can use our finest faculties.
~ William Butler Yeats

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I think that the movement of our thought has more and more so separated certain images and regions of the mind, and that these images grow in beauty as they grow in sterility.
~ William Butler Yeats

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