William Butler Yeats Quotes
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I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember
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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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What can be explained is not poetry.
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When we have blamed the wind we can blame love.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart, The holy tree is growing there.
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Love comes in at the eye.
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I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.
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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.
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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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The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold, And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes, For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies, With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold.
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Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone.
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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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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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The soldier takes pride in saluting his Captain, The devotee proffers a knee to his Lord, Some back a mare thrown from a thoroughbred, Troy backed its Helen, Troy died and adored; Great nations blossom above, A slave bows down to a slave.
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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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I have found nothing half so good / As my long-planned half solitude, / Where I can sit up half the night / With some friend that has the wit.
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But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love Of solitary beds, knew what they were, That passion could bring character enough And pressed at midnighht in some public place Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
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Acquaintance; companion; One dear brilliant woman; The best-endowed, the elect, All by their youth undone, All, all, by that inhuman Bitter glory wrecked.
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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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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.