William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep. . . .
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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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But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good.
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O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
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The Irishman sustains himself during brief periods of joy by the knowledge that tragedy is just around the corner.
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And there's a score of duchesses, surpassing womankind, Or who have found a painter to make them so for pay And smooth out stain and blemish with the elegance of his mind: I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.
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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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I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.
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Give to these children, new from the world, Rest far from men. Is anything better, anything better? Tell us it then.
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I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
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Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree. In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
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How can we know the dancer from the dance?
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All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
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I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.
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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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Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
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I pray-for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.
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From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
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Where there is nothing, there is God.
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Because this age and the next age Engender in the ditch, No man can know a happy man From any passing wretch, If Folly link with Elegance No man knows which is which.
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The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
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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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O heart! O heart! if she'd but turn her head You'd know the folly of being comforted.
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It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.