William Butler Yeats

Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.

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

From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.

Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.

Was it for this the wild geese spread The gray wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this. Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave? Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?

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

Who mocks at music mocks at love.

And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.

I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

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.

BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.

Where there is nothing, there is God.

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

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick

We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The Mask "Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes." "O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold." "I would but find what's there to find, Love or deceit." "It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind." "But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire." "O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?"

Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.