William Butler Yeats

"To have great poetry we must have great audiences too."

"The Mask reveals man; it does not hide him."

"All empty souls tend to extreme opinions."

"Bore in mind that the more you travel around and the more you speak to, the more curious you become."

"I am very rich, very famous, and very unhappy."

"He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That clearly points to a political career."

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

"A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages: first an acquaintance, next a mistress, and only then a friend."

"Before the world was made we had planned to prove his blood a crime."

"Art is the effort of man to express, not to expose, himself."

"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas into strong ones."

"A nation is the unity of the dead, the living, and the to be born."

"Faith must be enforced by reason."

"True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue."

"The highest courage is to dare to appear foolish."

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

"Surely some revelation is at hand."

"I have made my choice; I have realized my purpose; and I know that when I go hence I go to the bosom of my Creator."

"There are things that we know of that we cannot speak; there are things that we see that we dare not name."

"A politician is an acrobat; he keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does."

"The slave begins to think and to find himself the slave of thought."

"Who can distinguish the dancer from the dance, or separate the music from the musician?"

"In this book the author appears as a spiritual adventurer seeking that beauty of life that is to be found in a state of high excellence."

"The only form of intellectual honesty is an absolute devotion to truth."

"Hard to discern which of us is mad."

"I will not accept that death is the end of all things."

"Memory plays the largest part in intellectual work; memory is the treasurer and guardian of all things."

"We begin to live when we have conceived life as a tragedy."

"The poet ever mediates between divine and human powers."

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year."