William Butler Yeats Quotes

If you ever start taking things too seriously, just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe.

I do value my work awfully; but in reality only consider this: all this world of ours is nothing but a speck of mildew, which has grown up on a tiny planet. And for us to suppose we can have something great - ideas, work - it's all dust and ashes.

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.

We are not significant on the cosmic scale.

And as I looked at the star, I realised what millions of other people have realised when looking at stars. We're tiny. We don't matter. We're here for a second and then gone the next. We're a sneeze in the life of the universe.

Truth exists. The sole purpose of this proposition is to assert the existence of truth against imbeciles and sceptics.

Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands.

The choice is: the Universe...or nothing.

The truth has no form, you know. It's not like walking around trying to actually ask for favors and to be acknowledged, it is what it is.

The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.

The real nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, all that was not present did not exist.

It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is

The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it.

The Gay Science, section 108

The universe does not care what we want.

Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us.

It must be this rhapsody or none, The rhapsody of things as they are.

Although the pure truth has never been stated, nevertheless it has never been lost. Its existence does not depend upon human statement but upon human sensitivity. In this it is unlike all other knowledge.

I am all that there is of the most real.

Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be.

Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Existence has no personality. No question of personalities, it simply is whatsoever it is. To experience existence as it is, is to know the truth.

Let man reawake and consider what he is compared with the reality of things; regard himself lost in this remote corner of Nature; and from the tiny cell where he lodges, to wit the Universe, weigh at their true worth earth, kingdoms, towns, himself. What is a man face to face with infinity?