William Butler Yeats Quotes

If you look at the primitive societies that we know about, the worst thing that could have happened to you was to be captured and be turned over to the women.

I'm moving and not moving at all. I'm like the moon underneath the waves that ever go on rolling and rocking. It is not, "I am doing this," but rather, an inner realization that "this is happening through me," or "it is doing this for me." The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.

Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?

New York City is my playground.

One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world.

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities contract not only an effeminacy of habit, but of thinking.

A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

The thing about living alone is that it gives you a lot of time to think. You don't necessarily reach any conclusions, because wisdom is largely a function of intelligence and self-awareness, not time on your hands. But you do become very good at thinking yourself into endless loops of desperation in half the time it would take a normal person.

I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.

I'm always moving apartments or moving houses or moving cities.

I grew up on the West Side - the "near West Side," [in Detroit], as they say - in what would be considered now the inner city.

In New York City, the common bats fly only at twilight. Brick-bats fly at all hours.

Houses are fundamental metaphors for self, world, permeability, transition, interiority, exteriority, multiplicity, and the power to move from one state of being to another.

The great thing about living in New York is the constant change of things. It inspires me to keep moving, push forward, question ideas. I have a heavy travel schedule so being in a new environment always gives me another perspective to see things from.

The cool thing for me about moving to New York was that I got to create a new family.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

Self-awareness moves us beyond the old, well-worn pathways in the brain that support fixed, unconscious habits.

The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along.

A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past. One must look lengthwise backwards in the stream of time in order to see theself, or its shadow, now moving with the stream, now eddying in the currents from bank to bank of its channel, and now strenuously straining onwards in the pursuit of its chosen good.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.

That's the trouble with you sad-city types: a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real.

Savages!' he echoed, ironically. 'You set foot on one of the shores of this globe, professor, and you’re surprised to find savages? Where aren’t there savages? Besides, are they any worse than others, these whom you call savages?