William Butler Yeats Quotes on Mind (19 Quotes)


    People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

    My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

    I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

    A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstinting has been naught.

    Hands, do what you're bid Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.



    Civilization is hoped together, brought under a rule, under the semblance of peace by manifold illusion, but Man's life is thought, and he, despite his terror, cannot cease, ravening through century after century ravening, raging and uprooting, that

    But what is Whiggery A leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind That never looked out of the eye of a saint Or out of a drunkard's eye.

    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 of creating magic illusions in the visions of truth in the depths of the minds when the eyes are closed.


    See how the sacred old flamingoes come,Painting with shadow all the marble stepsAged and wise, they seek their wonted perchesWithin the temple, devious walking, madeTo wander by their melancholy minds.

    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.

    What do you think of when alone at nightDo not the things your mothers spoke about,Before they took the candle from the bedside,Rush up into the mind and master it,Till you believe in them against your will

    John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought All that we did, all that we said or sang Must come from contact with the soil, from that Contact everything Antaeus-like grew strong.

    The Mask 'Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes.' 'O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold.' 'I would but find what's there to find, Love or deceit.' 'It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind.' 'But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire.' 'O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me'

    Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.

    In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.

    If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

    Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.


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