I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, and what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power...

Who can tell the dancer from the dance?

Life moves out of a red flare of dreams into a common light of common hours, until old age bring the red flare again.

In Imagination only we find a Human Faculty that touches nature at one side, and spirit on the other. Imagination may be described as that which is sent bringing spirit to nature, entering into nature,...

When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.

when sleepers wake and yet still dream

In dreams begin responsibility

Others because you did not keepThat deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;Yet always when I look death in the face,When I clamber to the heights of sleep,Or when I grow excited with wine,Suddenly I...

Words alone are certain good.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.

Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.

we can make our minds so still like water. That beings gather about us to see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer perhaps even with a fiercer life because...

he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.’

Out of Ireland have we come.Great hatred, little room,Maimed us at the start.

A man who does not exist,A man who is but a dream.

Test every work of intellect or faith,And everything that your own hands have wroughtAnd call those works extravagance of breathThat are not suited for such men as comeproud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,Nor public men, nor cheering crowds.

Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us, And weary and worn are our sad souls now; Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us, With a kiss and a tear...

Until the axle break That keeps the stars in their round, And hands hurl in the deep The banners of East and West, And the girdle of light is unbound, Your breast will not lie...

Evil comes to all us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.

I at midnight by the clock may creep into your bed.

What shall I do for pretty girlsNow my old bawd is dead?

Out of Ireland have we come. Great hatred, little room, Maimed us at the start.

If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.

Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.

It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless. (William Butler Yeats described his first meeting with a Hindu philosopher at Dublin)

Things said or done long years ago,Or things I did not do or sayBut thought that I might say or do,Weigh me down, and not a dayBut something is recalled,My conscience or my vanity appalled.

The last stroke of midnight dies.All day in the one chairFrom dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have rangedIn rambling talk with an image of air:Vague memories, nothing but memories.

To me all things are made of the conflict of two states of consciousness, beings or persons which die each other’s life, live each other’s death. That is true of life & death themselves.

Now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher.

To be born woman is to know – although they do not speak of it at school – women must labor to be beautiful.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

Style, personality — deliberately adopted and therefore a mask — is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. . . .I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

It would need a great deal of wisdom to know what it is we want to know.

Where got I that truth? Out of a medium’s mouth, Out of nothing it came, Out of the forest loam, Out of dark night where lay The crowns of Nineveh

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdainsAll that man is;All mere complexities,The fury and the mire of human veins.

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.

The friends that have it I do wrongWhen ever I remake a song,Should know what issue is at stake:It is myself that I remake.

I have no question:It is enough, I know what fixed the stationOf star and cloud.And knowing all, I cry. . . .

We had fed the heart on fantasies,The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.

The folly that man doesOr must suffer, if he woosA proud woman not kindred of his soul.

Where, where but here have Pride and Truth,That long to give themselves for wage,To shake their wicked sides at youthRestraining reckless middle age?

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.