William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Who mocks at music mocks at love.
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Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
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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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I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.
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I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
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My curse on plays That have to be set up in fifty ways, On the day's war with every knave and dolt, Theater business, management of men.
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I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
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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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Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.
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When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.
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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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Sometimes my feet are tired and my hands are quiet, but there is no quiet in my heart.
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Because the priest must have like every dog his day Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon, We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
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For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence; And should they paint or write still is it action, The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
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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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Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.
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Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.
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Fairies in Ireland are sometimes as big as we are, sometimes bigger, and sometimes, as I have been told, about three feet high.
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And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.
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We are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Burke; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.
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It's certain that fine women eat A crazy salad with their meat.
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Life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.
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What can books of men that wive In a dragon-guarded land, Paintings of the dolphin-drawn Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons Do, but awake a hope to live...?
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Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.