William Butler Yeats Quotes
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For men were born to pray and save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.
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There is another world, but it is in this one.
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All the wild-witches, those most notable ladies For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone.
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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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I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay
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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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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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Style, personality - deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - is the only escape from the hot-faced bargainers and money-changers.
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A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought Upon the Norman upland or in that poplar shade, Should find no burden but itself and yet should be worn out. It could not bear that burden and therefore it went mad.
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A lonely impulse of delight
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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!
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I agree about Shaw - he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.
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Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
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We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind And lost the old nonchalance of the hand; Whether we have chosen chisel, pen or brush, We are but critics, or but half create.
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How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world.
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Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
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When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea.
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And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.
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The world being illusive, one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in it.
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I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye, And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat.
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I kiss you and kiss you, With arms around my own, Ah, how shall I miss you, When, dear, you have grown.
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The Bishop has a skin, God knows, Wrinkled like the foot of a goose, (All find safety in the tomb.) Nor can he hide in holy black The heron's hunch upon his back, But a birch-tree stood my Jack.