William Butler Yeats Quotes

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

William Butler Yeats

• Poetry
• Argument
• Rhetoric
• Quarrels

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Quotes to Explore

• With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

  

  Edgar Allan Poe
  • Passion
  • Purpose
  • Poetry

• I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

  

  Felix Dennis
  • People
  • Care
  • Poetry

• For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

  

  F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • You
  • Poetry
  • Quit

• If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

  

  Wallace Stevens
  • Poetry
  • Bible
  • Same

• A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

  

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko
  • Poetry
  • Poet
  • Anything

• I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

  

  Randall Jarrell
  • Think
  • Culture
  • Poetry

• If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.

  

  Gary Hume
  • Poetry
  • Hunting
  • Desperate

• Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.

  

  Ed Koch
  • People
  • Art
  • Poetry

• Poetry, whatever the manifest content of the poem, is always a violation of the rationalism and morality of bourgeois society.

  

  Octavio Paz
  • Society
  • Poetry
  • Morality

• Poetry is the deification of reality.

  

  Edith Sitwell
  • Reality
  • Poetry

• Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

  

  Ian Hamilton Finlay
  • Up
  • Different
  • Bad

• The strangest thing about the low quality of Internet argument is that effective argument isn't really so difficult. Sure, not everyone can be Clarence Darrow, but anyone who wants to be at least competent at argument can do it.

  

  Barry Eisler
  • Quality
  • Argument
  • Effective

• Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

  

  Tahar Ben Jelloun
  • Words
  • Relationship
  • Poetry

• I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it's poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

  

  Taylor Swift
  • Work
  • Simple
  • Poetry

• Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

  

  Floyd Skloot
  • Work
  • Music
  • Poetry

• It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • True
  • Poetry
  • Literature

• I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

  

  J. Carter Brown
  • Music
  • Poetry
  • Arts

• If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty.

  

  Rainer Maria Rilke
  • Life
  • Poetry
  • Poverty

• I was having an argument with my stepfather, and he was like, 'Why don't you join the Marine Corps?' And I was like, 'Noooo! Well, maybe, actually... ' I went and saw the recruiter, who was like, 'Are you on the run from the cops? Because we've never had someone want to leave so fast.'

  

  Adam Driver
  • Why
  • Want
  • Argument

• Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

  

  Aristotle
  • History
  • Poetry
  • Particular

• I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

  

  Seamus Heaney
  • Poetry
  • Darkness
  • Rhyme

• American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage.

  

  Alan Greenspan
  • American

• We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • Poetry
  • Argument
  • Rhetoric