-
Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
William Butler Yeats -
When two close kindred meet What better than call a dance?.
William Butler Yeats
-
If I make the lashes dark And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed: I'm looking for the face I had Before the world was made.
William Butler Yeats -
One often hears of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a mans eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious,of many things we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away.
William Butler Yeats -
Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!
William Butler Yeats -
Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
William Butler Yeats -
Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.
William Butler Yeats -
Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.
William Butler Yeats
-
When I clamber to the heights of sleep, Or when I grow excited with wine, suddenly I meet your face.
William Butler Yeats -
Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.
William Butler Yeats -
What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
William Butler Yeats -
It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.
William Butler Yeats -
And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
William Butler Yeats -
And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.
William Butler Yeats
-
We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.
William Butler Yeats -
We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
William Butler Yeats -
Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
William Butler Yeats -
There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.
William Butler Yeats -
Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye, In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky With all their ancient faces like rain- beaten stones, And all their helms of silver hovering.
William Butler Yeats -
Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.
William Butler Yeats
-
You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?
William Butler Yeats -
Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.
William Butler Yeats -
There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate.
William Butler Yeats -
now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
William Butler Yeats