William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
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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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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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Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.
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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
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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.
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The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
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This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
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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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Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
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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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One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
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When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place, While those same hundreds mock another day Because we have made our art of common things.
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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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It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.
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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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Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
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If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.
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Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.
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The poor have very few hours in which to enjoy themselves; they must take their pleasure raw; they haven't the time to cook it.
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on the instant clamorous eaves, A climbing moon upon an empty sky, And all that lamentation of the leaves, Could but compose man's image and his cry.
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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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When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright.
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BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.