William Butler Yeats Quotes
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I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
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Come away, O human child: To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
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You ask what I have found and far and wide I go, Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew, The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay, And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?
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Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood, Even where horrible green parrots call and swing. My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.
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No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
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What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.
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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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And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place.
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I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.
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Who mocks at music mocks at love.
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera.
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Overcome the Empyrean; hurl Heaven and Earth out of their places, That in the same calamity Brother and brother, friend and friend, Family and family, City and city may contend.
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All things can tempt me from this craft of verse: One time it was a woman's face, or worse-- The seeming needs of my fool-driven land; Now nothing but comes readier to the hand Than this accustomed toil.
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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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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.
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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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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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Shakespeare cared little for the State, the source of all our judgments, apart from its shows and splendours, its turmoils and battles, its flamings out of the uncivilized heart.
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When I think of all the books I have read, and of the wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety I have given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.
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We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
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Where there is nothing, there is God.
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There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.
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There is another world, but it is in this one.
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I think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one's self.