William Butler Yeats Quotes
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but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.
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Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
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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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Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted, Their heads being turned with praise and flattery; And that is why their lovers are afraid To tell them a plain story.
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For wisdom is the property of the dead, A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood, A property of the living; but no stain Can come upon the visage of the moon When it has looked in glory from a cloud.
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The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.
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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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To be born woman is to know - although they do not speak of it at school - women must labor to be beautiful.
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The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.
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I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow; And then I must scrub and bake and sweep Till the stars are beginning to blink and peep; And the young lie long and dream in their bed.
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If soul my look and body touch, Which is the more blest?
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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.
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I can exchange opinion with any neighbouring mind, I have as healthy flesh and blood as any rhymer's had, But O! my Heart could bear no more when the upland caught the wind; I ran, I ran, from my love's side because my Heart went mad.
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Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.
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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
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I have read somewhere that in the Emperor's palace at Byzantium was a tree made of gold and silver, and artificial birds that sang.
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Nor bird nor beast Could make me wish for anything this day, Being old, but that the old alone might die, And that would be against God's Providence.
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I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.
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A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.
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The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
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Love comes in at the eye.
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Cast your mind on other days that we in coming days may be still the indomitable Irishry.
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It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.