William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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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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I--love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb-- Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb.
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Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there; From joy the holy branches start, And all the trembling flowers they bear. The changing colours of its fruit Have dowered the stars with metry light; The surety of its hidden root Has planted quiet in the night; The shaking of its leafy head Has given the waves their melody, And made my lips and music wed, Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
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Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
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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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While man can still his body keep Wine or love drug him to sleep, Waking he thanks the Lord that he Has body and its stupidity.
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It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.
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The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
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Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.
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And many a poor man that has roved Loved and thought himself beloved From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
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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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I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea! We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fadeand flee; And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky, Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
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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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O but we dreamed to mend Whatever mischief seemed To afflict mankind, but now That winds of winter blow Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.
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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
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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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I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.
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Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
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Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
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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.
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In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
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Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, And the winds that blow through the starry ways, Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood Cover over and hide, for he has no part With the lonely, majestical multitude.
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Many times man lives and dies between his two eternities: that of race and that of Soul... A brief parting from those dear is the worst man has to fear... Though grave diggers' toil is long... They but thrust their buried men back in the human mind again.