William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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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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Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
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only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.
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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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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.
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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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Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
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I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
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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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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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In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.
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Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
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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
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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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I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.
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What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.
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By logic and reason we die hourly; by imagination we live.
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Brown Penny I WHISPERED, 'I am too young,' And then, 'I am old enough'; Wherefore I threw a penny To find out if I might love. 'Go and love, go and love, young man, If the lady be young and fair.' Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, I am looped in the loops of her hair. O love is the crooked thing, There is nobody wise enough To find out all that is in it, For he would be thinking of love Till the stars had run away And the shadows eaten the moon. Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny, One cannot begin it too soon.
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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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I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.
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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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If what I say resonates with you, it's merely because we're branches of the same tree.
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Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then.