William Butler Yeats Quotes
-
Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
-
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.
-
An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
-
If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.
-
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.
-
One should not lose one's temper unless one is certain of getting more and more angry to the end.
-
Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.
-
Mock mockers after that That would not lift a hand maybe To help good, wise or great To bar that foul storm out, for we Traffic in mockery.
-
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.
-
Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
-
Because I helped to wind the clock, I come to hear it strike.
-
I knew that I had seen, had seen at last That girl my unremembering nights hold fast Or else my dreams that fly If I should rub an eye, And yet in flying fling into my meat A crazy juice that makes the pulses beat.
-
I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.
-
I thought it out this very day, Noon upon the clock, A man may put pretence away Who leans upon a stick, May sing, and sing until he drop, Whether to maid or hag.
-
Eyes spiritualised by death can judge, I cannot, but I am not content.
-
I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye, For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by.
-
It seems that I must bid the Muse to pack, / Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend / Until imagination, ear and eye, / Can be content with argument and deal / In abstract things; or be derided by / A sort of battered kettle at the heel.
-
It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is
-
When all is said and done, how do we know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey.
-
And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, That dying chose the living world for text And never could have rested in the tomb But that, long travelling, he had come Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place.
-
I heard the old, old, men say 'all that's beautiful drifts away, like the waters.'
-
It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.
-
Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.
-
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.