Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats frames the mind not as a sovereign but as a courtier: its "only business" is to keep bowing, endlessly, to the heart. The diction is deliberately ceremonial. "Obeisance" is what you do in the presence of a monarch or a god, not a feeling you happen to have on a Tuesday. By casting reason as etiquette, Yeats doesn’t merely prefer emotion; he humiliates intellect into a posture of service. The head can calculate, justify, and explain, but it cannot rule.

The line lands with extra force because Yeats is writing against a modernity that worships the measurable: bureaucracy, industry, and the kind of rational confidence that claims to tidy up human life. His Romantic inheritance is obvious, but his twist is sharper. He’s not arguing that the heart is "truer" in some Hallmark sense; he’s saying that thought, at its best, is devotion. The mind’s proper task is not to conquer desire but to recognize what already commands us: love, grief, longing, pride, terror.

Subtextually, there’s also a warning. "Ceaseless" suggests compulsion as much as reverence. If the head is always bowing, it’s never standing tall enough to interrogate what the heart wants. Yeats knew that hearts don’t only want beauty and intimacy; they want myths, flags, absolutes. In a life split between occult systems, political upheaval, and personal obsession, he’s capturing the seduction of surrender: the exquisite relief of letting intellect become an acolyte, even when the deity is unstable.