William Butler Yeats Quotes

My intentions go one way, my desires another. Thus I feel both self-indulgent and deprived.

Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.

I have one head that wants to be good, And one that wants to be bad. And always, as soon as I get up, One of my heads is sad.

What a fool you must be," said my head to my heart, or my sterner to my softer self.

Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.

I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of the self-abandonment required of me; yet outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation.

...one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

I know and love the good, yet, ah! the worst pursue.

I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet.

Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.

My brain said no. But my heart!

I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?

and I try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time.

And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.

There's a constant conflict, really, within me. As much as I really enjoy what I do at home... I play on my own little soccer team and I've been taking part in the community and living the life of any ordinary guy, I always find myself wistful and enveloped in a feeling I can't really get out of my system.

The shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

Fearing not that I'd become my enemy In the instant that I preach

And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

What does it mean when nightmares dream of peace? When shadows wish for light?

I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going.