William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?
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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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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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Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.
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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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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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Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
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now I bring full-flavoured wine out of a barrel found Where seven Ephesian topers slept and never knew When Alexander's empire passed, they slept so sound.
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Lionel Johnson comes the first to mind, That loved his learning better than mankind, Though courteous to the worst; much falling he Brooded upon sanctity.
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If Michael, leader of God's host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post He would his deeds forget.
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God spreads the heavens above us like great wings, And gives a little round of deeds and days.
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Swift has sailed into his rest; Savage indignation there Cannot lacerate his breast Imitate him if you dare, World-besotted traveler; he Served human liberty.
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I thought of rhyme alone, For rhyme can beat a measure out of trouble And make the daylight sweet once more.
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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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Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
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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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Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal; a man awaits his end dreading and hoping all.
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There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.
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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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I long for truth, and yet I cannot stay from that My better self disowns, For a man's attention Brings such satisfaction To the craving in my bones.
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BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.
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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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Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth, We are happy when we are growing.