William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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A thought Of that late death took all my heart for speech.
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True love is a discipline in which each divines the secret self of the other and refuses to believe in the mere daily self.
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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.
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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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Love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
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How can they know Truth flourishes where the student's lamp has shone, And there alone, that have no solitude? So the crowd come they care not what may come. They have loud music, hope every day renewed And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.
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When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.
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Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.
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Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills, Life overflows without ambitious pains; And rains down life until the basin spills, And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains As though to choose whatever shape it wills.
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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.
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From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.
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The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.
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Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.
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Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.
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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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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
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The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
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The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.
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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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O heart, we are old; The living beauty is for younger men: We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.
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O heart, be at peace, because Nor knave nor dolt can break What's not for their applause, Being for a woman's sake.
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
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Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the World! You, too, have come where the dim tides are hurled. Upon the wharves of sorrow, and heard ring The bell that calls us on; the sweet far thing.