William Butler Yeats

"The fascination of what's difficult has dried the sap out of my veins."

"Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."

"All things fall and are built again, and those that build them again are gay."

"A man can embody truth and know it, the moment he has ceased to need it."

"How should I presume?"

"The task of understanding and interpreting the world is the business of philosophy."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence is an act of rebellion."

"I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore."

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."

"The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work."

"Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge."

"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."

"When you are old and grey and full of sleep and nodding by the fire."

"We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into belief."

"Death is the only lover that comes to us unbidden."

"The supreme theme of life and death, of birth, destruction, and rebirth."

"I became a woman and found it good."

"A statesman is an easy man; he tells of war and peace in a rhyming scheme."

"Getting the facts of history requires much labor."

"Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light."

"The man who meditated, the wanderer on the roadside, spoke but little."

"Consciousness is not the governing thing; it is only the recording thing."

"We cannot live only for the moment that is passing."

"Poetry is the most direct way of saying things."

"What if God is not in the heavens, and the damnation of love is in following the other."

"The earth can be full of a kind of beauty one is wild to understand."

"The happiness of too many men in these centuries would pass away like a feather on the wind."

"And pluck till time and times are done the silver apples of the moon."

"The work of making poetry requires a particular kind of discipline and dedication."