How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

— W.B. Yeats

I am persuaded that our intellects at twenty contain all the truths we shall ever find

— W.B. Yeats

I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.

— W.B. Yeats

I carry the Sun in a Golden Cup, the Moon in a Silver Bag.

— W.B. Yeats

I had fallen into a profound dream-like reverie in which I heard him speaking as at a distance. 'And yet there is no one who communes with only one god,' he was saying, 'and the more a man lives in imagination and in a refined understanding, the more gods do he meet with and talk with, and the more does he come under the power of Roland, who sounded in the Valley of Roncesvalles the last trumpet of the body's will and pleasure; and of Hamlet, who saw them perishing away, and sighed; and of Faust, who looked for them up and down the world and could not find them; and under the power of all those countless divinities who have taken upon themselves spiritual bodies in the minds of the modern poets and romance writers, and under the power of the old divinities, who since the Renaissance have won everything of their ancient worship except the sacrifice of birds and fishes, the fragrance of garlands and the smoke of incense. The many think humanity made these divinities, and that it can unmake them again; but we who have seen them pass in rattling harness, and in soft robes, and heard them speak with articulate voices while we lay in deathlike trance, know that they are always making and unmaking humanity, which is indeed but the trembling of their lips.

— W.B. Yeats

I have just read a long novel by Henry James. Much of it made me think of the priest condemned for a long space to confess nuns.

— W.B. Yeats

I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.

— W.B. Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

— W.B. Yeats

In dreams begin responsibilities

— W.B. Yeats

In dreams begin responsibilities.

— W.B. Yeats