William Butler Yeats Quotes
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But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
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A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
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Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.
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The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.
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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.
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We are fastened to a dying animal.
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My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd. "This Land of Saints," and then as the applause died out, "Of plaster Saints;" his beautiful mischievous head thrown back.
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I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.
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The living can assist the imagination of the dead.
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Come let us mock at the great That had such burdens on the mind And toiled so hard and late To leave some monument behind, Nor thought of the leveling wind.
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That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.
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Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?
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Nor seek, for this is also sooth, To hunger fiercely after truth, Lest all thy toiling only breeds New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth Saving in thine own heart.
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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
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Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
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Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,' we could die upon the instant and be united with God.
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How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about, And there's a politician That has read and thought, And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms!
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Wine enters through the mouth, Love, the eyes. I raise the glass to my mouth, I look at you, I sigh.
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Wine comes in at the mouth And love comes in at the eye; That's all we shall know for truth Before we grow old and die.
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Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
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Let the minor genius go his light way and enjoy his life - the great nature cannot so live, he is never really in holiday mood, even though he often plucks flowers by the wayside and ties them into knots and garlands like little children and lays out on a sunny morning.
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Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns? I have been changed to a hound with one red ear; I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns.
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THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea