William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Life is a long preparation for something that never happens.
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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.
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And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
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The visible world is no longer a reality and the unseen world no longer a dream.
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We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
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Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun Now I may wither into the truth.
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Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.
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Joy is of the will which labours, which overcomes obstacles, which knows triumph.
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Hearts with one purpose alone/Through summer and winter seem/Enchanted to a stone/To trouble the living stream.
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Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
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I hear it in the deep heart's core.
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The wind blows out of the gates of the day, The wind blows over the lonely of heart, And the lonely of heart is withered away.
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Maybe the bride-bed brings despair, For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there...
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Heaven blazing into the head: Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages And all the drop-scenes drop at once Upon a hundred thousand stages It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.
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Time drops in decay Like a candle burnt out. And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; But, kindly old rout Of the fire-born moods, You pass not away.
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O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes, The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman's gaze.
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We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
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A man in his own secret meditation / Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made / In art or politics.
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Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.
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only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.
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The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
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O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
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Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
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A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.