William Butler Yeats Quotes
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I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away
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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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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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...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. Beauty grown sad with its eternity Made you of us, and of the dim grey sea. Our long ships loose thought-woven sails and wait, For God has bid them share an equal fate; And when at last defeated in His wars, They have gone down under the same white stars, We shall no longer hear the little cry Of our sad hearts, that may not live nor die.
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Although our love is waning, let us stand by the lone border of the lake once more, together in that hour of gentleness. When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
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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 mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. . . . I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance - the revolt of the soul against the intellect.
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Out of Ireland have we come, great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start. I carry from my mother's womb a fanatic heart.
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I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.
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While on that old grey stone I sat Under the old wind-broken tree, I knew that One is animate, Mankind inanimate phantasy.
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An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
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The only enemy of innocence and beauty is time.
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I had this thought a while ago, "My darling cannot understand What I have done, or what would do In this blind bitter land." And I grew weary of the sun
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Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way.
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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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Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
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From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye.