William Butler Yeats Quotes

Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God - I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.

Life is a series of avoiding horrible situations until ultimately you're dead. That's how I feel about things.

Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.

I think quite often a fate worse than death is life, for lots of people.

Imagining living in a universe without purpose may prepare us to better face reality head on. I cannot see that this is such a bad thing.

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

I'm comfortable in my miseries. I have no choice.

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

The course of a lifetime runs/over and over again

Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

HAPPY EVER AFTER is a concept I'll never believe in. I would be content to sample some little taste of happiness today, tonight, right now. Though I know without a doubt that tomorrow will come saturated with pain. Life is like that. At least my life. And honestly, I cant think of anyone whose life is any different. The price tag for joy is misery. [...]

life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.

Poetry will exist as long as there is a problem of life and death

Life on a lifeboat isn't much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with a few pieces. The elements couldn't be more simple, nor the stakes higher. Physically it is extraordinarily arduous, and morally it is killing...You get your happiness where you can. You reach a point where you're at the bottom of hell, yet you have your arms crossed and a smile on your face, and you feel you're the luckiest person on earth. Why? Because at your feet you have a tiny dead fish

Good God, man, what is that smell?" He eyed with disgust the doctor's filthy cloak. "Life," answered the doctor.

And that wreched creature without hands or feet, who had to be put to bed and fed like a child, that pitiable remnant of a man, whose almost vanished life was nothing more than one scream of pain, cried out in furious indignation: 'What a fool one must be to go and kill oneself!' " - 'Joy of Life

I'd like to end the book a lot of ways. Except I don't have any answers. Use your common sense. Be nice. This is the best I can do. All the trouble in the world is human trouble. Well, that's not true. But when cancer cells run amok and burst out of the prostate and take over the liver and lymph glands and end up killing everything in the body including themselves, they certainly are acting like some humans we know.

All death in nature is birth, and at the moment of death appears visibly the rising of life. There is no dying principle in nature, for nature throughout is unmixed life, which, concealed behind the old, begins again and develops itself. Death as well as birth is simply in itself, in order to present itself ever more brightly and more like to itself.

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

We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrary things, and one part is no less necessary than the other.

Birth leads to death, death precedes birth. So if you want to see life as it really is, it is rounded on both the sides by death. Death is the beginning and death is again the end, and life is just the illusion in between. You feel alive between two deaths; the passage joining one death to another you call life. Buddha says this is not life. This life is dukkha - misery. This life is death.

He seemed to be talking about my fears, my insecurity, and my unwillingness to see what was wonderful because tomorrow it might disappear and I might suffer. The gods throw the dice, and they don't ask whether we want to be in the game or not.

Since every man who lives is born to die, And none can boast sincere felicity, With equal mind, what happens, let us bear, Nor joy nor grieve too much for things beyond our care. Like pilgrims to the' appointed place we tend; The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.