William Butler Yeats Quotes
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I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams.
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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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The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.
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What shall I do for pretty girls Now my old bawd is dead?
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We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.
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A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
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An intellectual hatred is the worst.
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Words alone are certain good.
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Teaching is not filling up a pail, it is lighting a fire.
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Ah, let us kiss each other's eyes,/And laugh our love away.
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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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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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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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For Death who takes what man would keep, Leaves what man would lose.
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We only believe in those thoughts which have been conceived not in the brain but in the whole body.
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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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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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All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbor knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?
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Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun.
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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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How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.
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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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Our words must seem to be inevitable.
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It's certain there are trout somewhere - And maybe I shall take a trout - but I do not seem to care.