William Butler Yeats Quotes

Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.

William Butler Yeats

• Life
• Progress
• Journey
• Progressive

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Quotes to Explore

• A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.

  

  Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Good
  • Smile
  • Warm

• I want to stop transforming and just start being.

  

  Ursula Burns
  • Want
  • Stop
  • Start

• The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.

  

  C. L. R. James
  • People
  • Great
  • American

• In occupied Iraq, the introduction of new paper money took almost a year, 20 or so Boeing 747s, the mobilisation of the U.S. military's might, three printing firms, and hundreds of trucks.

  

  Yanis Varoufakis
  • Money
  • Military
  • Year

• Any film is about heroism: the triumph of good over evil. If you look back at my films, you will see that as a recurring theme.

  

  Salman Khan
  • Good
  • Evil
  • Heroism

• I don't pick and choose subjects or settings; they pick and choose me.

  

  Vikram Seth
  • Me
  • Choose
  • Settings

• As a kid at school, I had a lot of really good teachers and I had a lot of really bad teachers, and I just know how much of an impact those can have on a young child. To be one of the good teachers - I want to have that kind of impact.

  

  Rachel Hurd-Wood
  • Good
  • School
  • Bad

• My life is black and white and mixed. My mother's a Rastafarian, my dad was a short white guy - it's not an affectation. It's also the lives of millions of people throughout the world.

  

  Zadie Smith
  • People
  • Life
  • World

• Near the end of my career, I saw things that didn't make too much sense to me when I was a kid.

  

  Nadia Comaneci
  • Career
  • End
  • Sense

• Being an actor is a good way to earn a living. And to meet fabulous people. It's great to live very comfortably. I've been lucky, I've had a lot of fun with great roles, but it is true that if I were extremely rich, I would stop and I would go to play football on a beach in the Caribbean with my children.

  

  Gary Oldman
  • People
  • Good
  • Great

• I try to get away and take my motorcycle on a ride whenever I can. I'll take my bike out before the show and just cruise.

  

  Zac Brown Band
  • Bike
  • Ride
  • Motorcycle

• The atmosphere of Catholicism in Korea is quite different to the way it is practised and perceived in Europe or the U.S.

  

  Park Chan-wook
  • Different
  • Way
  • Europe

• I guess I was always a ham, and I was anxious to try doing different things. I started doing impressions to make friends at school. I would do them during recess. Maybe some of the kids thought I was being weird, but everyone seemed to have a good time.

  

  Vesta Williams
  • Time
  • Good
  • Different

• I'm actually a big fan of having all the different types of voices on television. I think it gives people a nice little buffet that they can just pick and choose how they want to get their news and entertainment, I guess.

  

  Larry Wilmore
  • People
  • Different
  • Think

• I'm lucky because I had blonde hair for a while for this TV show I was doing – they had me dye my hair blonde – and every audition I was going out for was bleach blonde. The mean girl, the pretty girlfriend, and the dumb cheerleader.

  

  Haley Lu Richardson
  • Pretty
  • Girl
  • Mean

• I didn't know that I could do a talk show. I didn't know that we could bring variety to daytime. I didn't know that people wanted to see singing, and dancing and comedy in the morning.

  

  Wayne Brady
  • People
  • Comedy
  • Morning

• The Marcos era was the golden time for the Philippines. We had the lowest crime rate in the world in Manila and real development then. At last, people are starting to understand this.

  

  Imelda Marcos
  • People
  • Time
  • World

• For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

  

  Patrick J. Kennedy
  • Children
  • Age
  • Today

• I'm not better than other politicians, but I'm different because I got into the game much later in life, after I had raised a family, after I had written a book, after I had been a successful lawyer. It's different when you get into this business after you've led a full life. I don't want to be a big man. I know who I am.

  

  Mario Cuomo
  • Life
  • Different
  • Family

• I'm so lucky because I get to have all of these memories. I can have all of those pictures and different sorts of films and stuff. Some people have only one photo, and I'm really glad that I have all of that.

  

  Bindi Irwin
  • People
  • Different
  • Memories

• What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?

  

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

• We are born with freedom and hope, but often that's dashed because of our color. But in school, I'd already been taught that no one could tell me that you can't do something because you're black.

  

  Louis Gossett, Jr.
  • School
  • Hope
  • Black

• I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.

  

  Ariana Reines
  • Writing
  • Bad
  • Proud

• Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground covered we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward.

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • Life
  • Progress
  • Journey