William Butler Yeats Quotes
-
Though logic-choppers rule the town, And every man and maid and boy Has marked a distant object down, An aimless joy is a pure joy.
-
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.
-
Before me floats an image, man or shade, / Shade more than man, more image than a shade.
-
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.
-
All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
-
Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
-
Cuchulain stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried; And fought with the invulnerable tide.
-
An age is the reversal of an age: When strangers murdered Emmet, Fitzgerald, Tone, We lived like men that watch a painted stage. What matter for the scene, the scene once gone: It had not touched our lives.
-
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.
-
And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
-
The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart.
-
I--love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb-- Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb.
-
When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.
-
I am of a healthy long lived race, and our minds improve with age.
-
I call on those that call me son, Grandson, or great-grandson, On uncles, aunts, great-uncles or great-aunts, To judge what I have done. Have I, that put it into words, Spoilt what old loins have sent?
-
The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle's eye.
-
Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
-
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.
-
People are responsible for their opinions, but Providence is responsible for their morals.
-
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?
-
Everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy kind of delight.
-
All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other's, We were so much at one.
-
No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.