William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Test every work of intellect or faith, And everything that your own hands have wrought And call those works extravagance of breath That are not suited for such men as come Proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.
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What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.
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And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
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I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
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An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?
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While they danced they came over them the weariness with the world, the melancholy, the pity one for the other, which is the exultation of love.
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A drunkard is a dead man And all dead men are drunk.
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The true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary, Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeler.
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Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day.
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And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well; And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.
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Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.
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I have observed dreams and visions very carefully, and am now certain that the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth that the reason has not, and that its commandments, delivered when the body is still and the reason silent, are the most binding we can ever know.
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Between extremities Man runs his course; A brand, or flaming breath, Comes to destroy All those antinomies Of day and night.
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Gaze no more in the bitter glass The demons, with their subtle guile, Lift up before us when they pass, Or only gaze a little while.
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If there's no hatred in a mind Assault and battery of the wind Can never tear the linnet from the leaf
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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.
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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.
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It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.
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Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
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The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.
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The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.
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Who mocks at music mocks at love.
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Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
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From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have ranged / In rambling talk with an image of air: / Vague memories, nothing but memories.