William Butler Yeats

"A line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

"Friendship is all about trust, understanding, and holding each other through seasons of change."

"In life, we must learn that becoming is more important than being."

"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and a stranger intermeddeth not with its joy."

"I have always believed that unchastity is the one eternal sin."

"Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry."

"Nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation."

"How small the life of the individual seems when weighed against the vast processes of nature."

"The young man sits and listens; the old man speaks with his silence."

"To be born a woman is to know—although they do not speak of it at school—that silence has been a condition of their existence."

"Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

"The purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it on something solid."

"A poet is, before anything else, a craftsman who must learn his trade."

"Time drops in decay, like a candle burnt out."

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

"In dreams begin responsibilities."

"The roads of excess lead to the palace of wisdom."

"Some women are flirts in fact as well as in word; they are taken by slight attentions, and it is difficult to obtain favors from them."

"Heaven blazes into the head."

"Hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste, but they detest at leisure."

"I prefer to read the weather in the sky rather than in the mirror."

"The world to me does not present a continuity, but rather a series of pictures or instances."

"All knowledge that is not pursued for its own sake is a kind of cowardice."

"The friends that have it I do wrong when ever I praise anyone; but the life that I praise is the life that God and Nature have made."

"Beauty is momentary in the mind; the fitful tracing of a portal, but in the flesh it is immortal."

"We are happiest when we have the fewest desires."

"I have noticed that the people who get ahead in the world are those who look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, they make them."

"Not all that tempts your wandering eyes and haughty heart is lawful prize."