-
How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?
William Butler Yeats -
yet it seems Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind, Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams, But the torn petals strew the garden plot; And there's but common greenness after that.
William Butler Yeats
-
The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart.
William Butler Yeats -
The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song After great cathedral gong.
William Butler Yeats -
Our own acts are isolated and one act does not buy absolution for another.
William Butler Yeats -
My chair was nearest to the fire In every company That talked of love or politics, Ere Time transfigured me.
William Butler Yeats -
somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
William Butler Yeats -
What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?
William Butler Yeats
-
And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.
William Butler Yeats -
What can be shown? What true love be? All could be known or shown If Time were but gone.
William Butler Yeats -
Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.
William Butler Yeats -
I sat on cushioned otter-skin: My word was law from Ith to Emain, And shook at Invar Amargin The hearts of the world-troubling seamen, And drove tumult and war away.
William Butler Yeats -
I have nothing more to give you than my heart. Spanish saying Hearts are not to be had as a gift hearts are to be earned.
William Butler Yeats -
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
William Butler Yeats
-
Hammer your thoughts into unity.
William Butler Yeats -
May we two stand, When we are dead, beyond the setting suns, A little from other shades apart, With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.
William Butler Yeats -
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree.
William Butler Yeats -
Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
William Butler Yeats -
I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs, For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood; And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes.
William Butler Yeats -
Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
William Butler Yeats
-
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: For there the mystical brotherhood Of sun and moon and hollow and wood And river and stream work out their will.
William Butler Yeats -
The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
William Butler Yeats -
Once you attempt legislation upon religious grounds, you open the way for every kind of intolerance and religious persecution.
William Butler Yeats -
Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
William Butler Yeats