William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.
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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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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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You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
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You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.
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When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay; Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side, The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream.
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And wisdom is a butterfly And not a gloomy bird of prey.
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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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O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.
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The common breeds the common, A lout begets a lout, So when I take on half a score I knock their heads about.
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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.
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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.
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Many ingenious lovely things are gone / That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.
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How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young; What else have I to spur me into song?
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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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There's keen delight in what we have: The rattle of pebbles on the shore Under the receding wave.
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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.
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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.
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The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
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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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Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
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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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And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.