William Butler Yeats Quotes

We start out as sand and soot out there in the universe, and who knows, in 40 trillion years' time we might come back. But if we come back without memory, it doesn't really interest me.

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

Yesternight the sun went hence, And yet is here today.

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

All that is born and destroyed is reborn in the sweep of the ages; Life like a decimal ever recurring repeats the old figure.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

I don't like walking in the street and seeing 30,000 copies of myself.

We have a name for things that don't copy themselves: dead.

Everything becomes and recurs eternally - escape is impossible!

Matter begins evolving back to Spirit and, when it's reached, the whole process begins over again for the billionth time.

You will always exist in the universe in one form or another.

Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.

Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.

All is ephemeral - fame and the famous as well.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks -- those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.

You know, like when you look in the mirror and the thing you see is not the thing as it really is.

Machines don't use machines.

A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent--sweet, not lasting; The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.

This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures.

I wish my days could be washed away like the chalk lines of my days.

I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps "Oh look at that!" Then - whoosh, and I'm gone... and they'll never see anything like it ever again... and they won't be able to forget me - ever.

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.

I'd found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unraveling, an insubstantial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.