William Butler Yeats Quotes
-
What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms?
-
Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
-
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
-
Laughter not time destroyed my voice And put that crack in it, And when the moon's pot-bellied I get a laughing fit.
-
Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.
-
And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
-
An Irish Airman foresees his Death I Know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate Those that I guard I do not love, My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor, No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before. Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds; I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death.
-
Cast a cold eye on life, on death Horseman pass by
-
Whatever flames upon the night Man's own resinous heart has fed.
-
Literature is always personal, always one man's vision of the world, one man's experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
-
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.
-
Education is not filling
-
One had a lovely face, And two or three had charm, But charm and face were in vain. Because the mountain grass Cannot keep the form Where the mountain hare has lain.
-
Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
-
I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young / And weep because I know all things now.
-
Before The World Was Made 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. What if I look upon a man as though on my beloved, and my blood be cold the while and my heart unmoved? Why should he think me cruel or that he is betrayed? I'd have him love the thing that was before the world was made.
-
I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore, Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
-
Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
-
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round, Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound, Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam, Our arms are waving, our lips are apart.
-
I--love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb-- Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb.
-
No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
-
And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.
-
Sweetheart, do not love too long: I loved long and long, And grew to be out of fashion Like an old song.
-
The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.