William Butler Yeats Quotes
-
Never give all the heart, for love Will hardly seem worth thinking of To passionate women if it seem Certain, and they never dream That it fades out from kiss to kiss; For everything that's lovely is But a brief, dreamy, kind delight. O Never give the heart outright, For they, for all smooth lips can say, Have given their hearts up to the play. And who could play it well enough If deaf and dumb and blind with love? He that made this knows all the cost, For he gave all his heart and lost.
-
I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent
-
The years like great black oxen tread the world, and God, the herdsman goads them on behind, and I am broken by their passing feet.
-
It seems to me that love, if it is fine, is essentially a discipline.
-
I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above; those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.
-
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.
-
It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
-
We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.
-
I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
-
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.
-
Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land; Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand.
-
From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
-
It is love that I am seeking for, But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind That is not in the world.
-
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.
-
True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
-
We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.
-
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
-
In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
-
Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
-
I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye, For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by.
-
When we have blamed the wind we can blame love.
-
As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.
-
We have fallen in the dreams the ever-living Breathe on the tarnished mirror of the world, And then smooth out with ivory hands and sigh.
-
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.