I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping... I hear it in the deep heart's core.

— W.B. Yeats

Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbor as himself.

— W.B. Yeats

Labor is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.

— W.B. Yeats

Ld heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;Wear out the carpet with their shoes Earning respect; have no strange friend;If they have sinned nobody knows. Lord, what would they say Should their Catullus walk that way?

— W.B. Yeats

Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.

— W.B. Yeats

My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty upon the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or Lessie seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.

— W.B. Yeats

Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking onto passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss;For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O Never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.

— W.B. Yeats

Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-colouredRamparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.

— W.B. Yeats

O bid me mount and sail up there Amid the cloudy wrack, For Peg and Meg and Paris' love That had so straight a back, Are gone away, and some that stay Have changed their silk for sack.

— W.B. Yeats

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomed, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

— W.B. Yeats