William Butler Yeats Quotes

Life is such a tragicomedy.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for a while and then act our part in it.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

Not to be born is, past all prizing, best.

I think portraying human beings trying to hold on to their humanity against pretty much certain odds that they'll die horribly in some way someday, and that they'll face horrible things along the way, I don't know - I think that's a beautiful thing. It's a wonderful thing.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

I hate to think life is just facts and laws.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

Birth, death, and suffering all bring us to the very edge of what our minds can understand.

Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.

The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.

We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other ... except through faith.

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

Tis not that dieing hurts us so- tis living- hurts us more.

To sue to live, I find I seek to die; And, seeking death, find life: let it come on.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Pain redeems all. It is the awareness of life, a reminder of death.

You have to be very deep to be dead, he thought, and I'm not. He began to have some concept of forever, and his mind shivered as his body had when he had wakened in the cold nights and thrust his hands between his thighs to keep warm. It will be a long night, he thought.