William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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.
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Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.
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The hare grows old as she plays in the sun And gazes around her with eyes of brightness; Before the swift things that she dreamed of were done She limps along in an aged whiteness.
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Does the imagination dwell the most Upon a woman won or a woman lost?
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I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.
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Man has created death.
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All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other's, We were so much at one.
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
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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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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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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.
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The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
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I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young / And weep because I know all things now.
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Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.
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There is another world, but it is in this one.
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Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
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Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
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Yet they that know all things but know That all this life can give us is A child's laughter, a woman's kiss.
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We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
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THOUGH you are in your shining days, Voices among the crowd And new friends busy with your praise, Be not unkind or proud, But think about old friends the most: Time's bitter flood will rise, Your beauty perish and be lost For all eyes but these eyes.
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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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I say that Roger Casement Did what he had to do, He died upon the gallows But that is nothing new.
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It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
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"Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea." The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days.