William Butler Yeats Thinking Quotations

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.

I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.

I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think.

An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?

God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.

I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.

THOUGH you are in your shining days, Voices among the crowd And new friends busy with your praise, Be not unkind or proud, But think about old friends the most: Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.

. . . you may think I waste my breath Pretending that there can be passion That has more life in it than death

All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?

Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.

I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window....

When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.