William Butler Yeats Quotes

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

William Butler Yeats

• Literature
• Mood
• Expression
• Vehicle

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Quotes to Explore

• Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

  

  A. B. Yehoshua
  • Literature
  • Understand
  • Gold

• I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.

  

  Garth Risk Hallberg
  • Things
  • Thought
  • Literature

• When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.

  

  Samuel Lover
  • Man
  • Literature
  • Pen

• I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

  

  V. S. Naipaul
  • Friends
  • Man
  • Nice

• Beauty without expression is boring.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Beauty
  • Expression
  • Boring

• The adolescent protagonist is one of the hallmarks of American literature.

  

  Tayari Jones
  • American
  • Literature

• Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

  

  Edmund White
  • Political
  • Community
  • Body

• I thought Sarah Palin was the ultimate expression of comic outrageousness in a person.

  

  Larry Wilmore
  • Person
  • Thought
  • Expression

• As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

  

  Nathaniel Philbrick
  • History
  • Always
  • English

• It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • Work
  • English
  • Language

• There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Mind
  • Strong
  • Culture

• I believe love at first sight is possible. Centuries of literature and art and beauty has been dedicated to that idea, so who am I to argue, even if I've never experienced it?

  

  Maggie Grace
  • Believe
  • Love
  • For Him

• My house is filled with books, most of which I have read, some of which I intend to eventually get to. I'm always reading at least one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction simultaneously. Whatever mood I'm in, there's always a book nearby to suit it.

  

  Rachel Nichols
  • Work
  • Book
  • House

• Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.

  

  Harrison Salisbury
  • Language
  • Literature
  • Economics

• Music is very powerful and can make you feel whatever it is. If you listen to gospel, you're going to feel thankful, and you're going to want to call up people that you hate and tell them that you love them. When you listen to sexual music, it gets you in the mood.

  

  R. Kelly
  • People
  • Powerful
  • Feel

• Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

  

  Wayne Grady
  • Literature
  • Memory
  • Down

• Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

  

  Karen Thompson Walker
  • Life
  • Great
  • Important

• I like to be comfortable, and don't like to be cold, and I don't like to wear anything I'm not in the mood for.

  

  Rachel Bilson
  • Cold
  • Mood
  • Comfortable

• The two have to go hand in hand - the atmosphere and the music. I actually get rather worried if I can't see the music first. There always needs to be a mood, a feeling, a story, even if it is abstract. There's got to be a narrative to guide things before they're even created.

  

  Alison Goldfrapp
  • Music
  • Feeling
  • Hand

• I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

  

  Emil Cioran
  • World
  • Mood

• The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

  

  Nelson Mandela
  • Culture
  • Education

• I think my biggest triumph as an artist has been navigating the music industry and being able to stay true to who I am and create the art that I want to make.

  

  Grace Weber
  • Want
  • Create
  • Triumph

• By the removal of the unnecessary mouths, and by extracting from the farmer the full value of the farm, a greater surplus, or what is the same thing, the price of a greater surplus, was obtained for the proprietor...

  

  Adam Smith
  • Value
  • Farmer

• What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • Literature
  • Mood
  • Expression