William Butler Yeats Quotes
-
only an aching heart Conceives a changeless work of art.
-
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.
-
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.
-
I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
-
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.
-
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid Under this cradle-hood and coverlid My child sleeps on.
-
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.
-
The mystical life is at the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.
-
Only God, my dear, Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.
-
We are fastened to a dying animal.
-
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.
-
I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic's heart.
-
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.
-
That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love.
-
Those men that in their writings are most wise Own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts.
-
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.
-
The living can assist the imagination of the dead.
-
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.
-
What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.
-
Man is in love and loves what vanishes, What more is there to say?