William Butler Yeats

"I am of Ireland, and the Holy Land of Ireland."

"Time can but make it easier to hide that stain upon our skin."

"May I seem, though I die and die, kindly and clear in the air."

"The friends that have it I do wrong when ever I remake a song, should know what issue is at stake."

"No country will receive wisdom until it accepts that the majority are not very wise."

"I have had the happiness of an idea only upon the rarest occasions."

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

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."

"Rhetoric may do well enough at the bar and in the pulpit, but the true business of poetry is not to rhetoricise."

"Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost."

"What if the Church and the State are the mob that howls at the door?"

"The worst thing one can do is not to try, to fake it, and thus to ruin the conviction of those who are on your voyage."

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

"The only way to control people is to lie to them."

"Do you ask what I fain would be? A student of the Middle Way."

"I have spent my life in vain attempts to overcome the conventions of my environment."

"The passionate intensity of one becomes the cold certainty of another."

"How strange it is to be anything at all."

"The arts are the unconscious evolution of humanity."

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

"I have loved four women and lived with one; for the others I used metaphor."

"We make out of the quarrel with ourselves poetry."

"Death and the sun cannot be looked at steadily."

"A statesman is an easy man, he does not have to think of consequences."

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

"I am not responsible for this world; I am only responsible for myself."

"Beauty and heroism have not altogether departed from mankind."

"Preach the sermon first to yourself before you preach it to others."

"The whole business of the world is to make things that matter, and the making of these things is what we call art."

"What need you, being come to sense, but fumble in a greasy till?"