William Butler Yeats Quotes

I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Good and bad men are less than they seem.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

You cannot look at a person and tell whether they're good or bad.

You are entering a phase of your life in which many different things will occur...bad things that seem good at first and good things that seem bad at first.

Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.

Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they otherwise.

I can't tell the difference between wrong and right, are you laughing at me?

There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.

Things don't always look as they seem.

Where unclarity resides, there is temptation, and there it proves only too easily the stronger. Wherever there is ambiguity, wherever there is wavering, there is disobedience down at the bottom.

Neither awake nor in a dark dream are perilous blades just as they seem.

The bad are frequently good enough to let you see how bad they are, but the good as frequently endeavor to get between you and themselves.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

Man has always been dexterous at confusing evil with good. That was Adam's and Eve's problem, and it is our problem today. If evil were not made to appear attractive, there would be no such thing as temptation.

Yes. The way people behave, the paradoxes, the contradictions. All these things we have to live with and still pretend that everything is only black or white. That, I think, is the most interesting thing in human nature. The fact that we have to do one thing and pretend something else. That’s when it becomes very interesting. If you can literally speak the way you feel, then it’s not interesting anymore. It’s when you have to lie that it becomes interesting.

It is not always from valor or from chastity that men are brave, and women chaste.

I don't know whether I'll reach 40. I don't know whether I'll reach 35. I can't be sure about that. I am bloody serious. I am very, very serious. I didn't think I'd make 30.

That is my theory to explain the I don't knows. It's human.

Life is a mystery,but man wants to reduce it to a problem!

False hope is worse than despair.