William Butler Yeats Quotes
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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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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 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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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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How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?
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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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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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A passion-driven exultant man sings out Sentences that he has never thought.
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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.
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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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If soul my look and body touch, Which is the more blest?
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My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.
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Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world, and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary. You may argue against it but you should no more treat it with disrespect than a perfectly cultivated writer would treat (say) the Catholic Church or the Church of Luther no matter how much he disliked them.
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Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
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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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Test every work of intellect or faith and everything that your own hands have wrought.
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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.
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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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We all to some extent meet again and again the same people and certainly in some cases form a kind of family of two or three or more persons who come together life after life until all passionate relations are exhausted, the child of one life the husband, wife, brother, sister of the next. Sometimes, however, a single relationship will repeat itself, turning its revolving wheel again and again.
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What portion in the world can the artist have, Who has awakened from the common dream, But dissipation and despair?
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God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.
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In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class.
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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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There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.