William Butler Yeats Quotes
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Nothing that we love overmuch Is ponderable to our touch.
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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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All that could run or leap or swim Whether in wood, water or cloud, Acclaiming, proclaiming, declaiming Him.
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Words alone are certain good.
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Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it.
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Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
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If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise.
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The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
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All men live in suffering I know as few can know, Whether they take the upper road Or stay content on the low.
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In dreams begins responsibility.
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All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
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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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Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
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How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.
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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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The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
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Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.
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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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I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
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God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone.
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Come near; I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.
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I have mummy truths to tell Whereat the living mock, Though not for sober ear, For maybe all that hear Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
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Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.
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Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna's children died.