Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

A soft line that lands like a summons: Yeats turns the private theater of dreams into a moral workplace. The phrasing is deliberately spare - not "from dreams comes art" or "hope", but responsibility, the word that drags imagination out of the clouds and into consequence. It works because it refuses the usual romantic bargain where dreaming excuses inaction. For Yeats, the dream is the start of obligation, not its alternative.

The subtext is almost political. Yeats lived through Ireland's cultural revival and its violent bid for independence, a moment when poetry and myth were not parlor entertainments but tools that could recruit, inflame, and sanctify. He understood how symbols move bodies. If you help build the dream of a nation, a purity, a heroic past, you also help author what people will do in its name. That includes the uglier outcomes dreamers like to disown.

There's also a personal edge. Yeats spent a lifetime forging a self out of desire, occult systems, and grand aesthetic programs. The line reads as self-discipline masquerading as aphorism: if you indulge the visionary life, you're accountable for what it makes of you. Dreams aren't innocent; they're prototypes. They rehearse the self you are becoming.

The genius is the pivot of "begins". Responsibility doesn't end dreaming; it starts there. Yeats sketches a chain reaction: imagination generates ideals, ideals generate actions, actions generate history. The first link is the one you can pretend isn't real. He won't let you.