“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”

Susan Johnston Graf, W.B. Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeats’ Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries

Consider also:

  1. “In his time educated people believed that they amused themselves with books of imagination but that they ‘made their souls’ by listening to sermons and by doing or by not doing certain things. When they had to explain why serious people like themselves honoured the great poets greatly they were hard put to it for lack of good reasons.”
  2. “I have been shot at with broad arrows. They have called me the ‘worst man in the world.’ They have accused me of doing everything from murdering women and throwing their bodies into the Seine to drug peddling. Some well-known journalists have delighted in attacking me in print. James Douglas described me as ‘a monster of wickedness.’ Horatio Bottomley branded me as a ‘dirty degenerate’ cannibal–everything he could think of. Some have been more precise.”
  3. “The limitation of his view was from the very intensity of his vision; he was a too literal realist of imagination, as others are of nature; and because he believed that the figures seen by the mind’s eye, when exalted by inspiration, were ‘eternal existences,’ symbols of divine essences, he hated every grace of style that might obscure their lineaments.”
  4. “Worst. Bet. Ever. Seriously.”
  5. “O desecrated lovers! O divine Passionate martyrs, virgin unto death! O kissing daughters of the unfed brine! O sisters of the west wind’s pitiful breath, There is One that pitieth!”