Yeats Art Quotes & Sayings

All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake. — William Butler Yeats

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. — William Butler Yeats

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only. — William Butler Yeats

All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it — W.B.Yeats

Silence is the enemy of justice. — Aline Ohanesian

Only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art. — William Butler Yeats

All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination. — W.B.Yeats

Before success can truly become routine, there must be that transition from that wanting/hoping to have success toward honestly knowing you can earn success with your talents and work ethic. — George M. Gilbert

All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence. — William Butler Yeats

People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off. — Pete Hamill

Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk — William Butler Yeats

Woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium ... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art. — Cynthia Ozick

No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority. — William Butler Yeats

The beauty of life is in happiness. — Debasish Mridha

I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do. — Lucian Freud

There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be a work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate. — William Butler Yeats

If I say 'Find me an interesting painting' to Google, someday a robot could go around the Picasso museum and take a picture for me. — Vijay Kumar

When we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things ... — William Butler Yeats

The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats. — Reynolds Price

Isn't it always the things that you can't see that hurt you? — Katie McGarry

In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness. — William Butler Yeats

Dream up the kind of world you want to live in. Dream out loud. — Bono

What is clearest, most memorable and important about art is its coming into being, and the world's best works of art, while telling of very diverse matters, are really telling about their birth. — W.B.Yeats

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind. — William Butler Yeats

What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live ... ? — William Butler Yeats

How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ? — William Butler Yeats

Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while. — W.B.Yeats

A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics. — William Butler Yeats

This resembles the slow discipline of art: it's the work that Rembrandt did, that Picasso and Yeats and Rilke and Bach did. Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize. — Robert Bly