William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
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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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I see a schoolboy when I think of him, With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
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BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.
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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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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 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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Because the priest must have like every dog his day Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon, We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
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This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.
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Much did I rage when young, Being by the world oppressed, But now with flattering tongue It speeds the parting guest.
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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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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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Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
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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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I believe... that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
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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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Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
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Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
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Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
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I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made.
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Through winter-time we call on spring, And through the spring on summer call, And when the abounding hedges ring Declare that winter's best of all: And after that there's nothing good Because the spring time has not come- Not know that what disturbs our blood Is but its longing for the tomb.
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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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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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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.