William Butler Yeats Quotes
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For such, Being made beautiful overmuch, Consider beauty a sufficient end, Lose natural kindness and maybe The heart-revealing intimacy That chooses right, and never find a friend.
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This melancholy London - I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
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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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We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.
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It's certain there is no fine thing Since Adam's fall but needs much laboring.
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You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
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Things said or done long years ago Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled.
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The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
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For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.
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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.
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Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
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I weave the shoes of Sorrow: Soundless shall be the footfall light In all men's ears of Sorrow, Sudden and light.
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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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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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I Sing what was lost and dread what was won, / I walk in a battle fought over again.
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When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
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All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.
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God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.
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There is another world, but it is in this one.
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There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.
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It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
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Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
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We are closed in, and the key is turned / On our uncertainty.
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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.